June 23, 2023 – Based on the title of this movie, you would think it is about an unlikely romance between two different elements, fire and water, but there are a lot more than just two story elements involved here.

The references to racism, with the water people being a higher social class than the fire people, gets folded into to the immigrant status of the fire family, Ember, the daughter of Bernie and Cinder Lumen, who moved to Element City to start a new life. Living in a kind of slum, Bernie starts a business, called Fireplace, that caters to fellow fire elementals.

Ember becomes romantically involved with Wade Ripple, a water elemental city inspector, who reluctantly cites the Fireplace for water system violations. He later traces the water leaks back to nearby canal, where he and Ember try to patch up the leak. Ember's father is opposed to her relationship with Wade, but Wade's parents, who are artistic, approve of her. They see that Ember has a natural talent for glass sculpture and encourage her to develop it.

Ember's father assumes that she will take over the family business when he retires, but she is not ready to deal with customers because of her fiery temper. Will Ember and Bernie find true love? Will the city shut down the Fireplace business? Will Ember find her true calling? There are a lot of questions in this movie that need to be answered.

It gets a little more complicated than that, however, when a new element is added to the story, one that goes back one more generation to Ember's grandfather, who apparently did not approve of his son's decision to move to Element City. This element of the story is reportedly based on the Korean family history of the film's director, Peter Sohn.

This story has a lot of elements that don't work together very well. I got the feeling, watching this, that it was a story by committee, and the committee kept coming up with new ideas that take the story in new directions. The result is a kind of tangled story tree that needed some of its branches pruned.

It seems as though there is only one character in this story who really knows what he wants, and that is Bernie Lumen. He just wants to run his Fireplace business, but is constantly being frustrated. Everything works out eventually, but not in a very convincing way. It seems as though the committee got to the end of the story with one good ending, and then quickly and inelegantly tied off the other story branches. This film rates a C+.

While there are problems with the story, the artwork is excellent, as is often the case with Pixar movies. While the elements of air and earth get little attention in this movie, the elements of water and fire are given lavish attention. There is a lot of visual imagination on display in this movie.

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