Elemental (2023) | Rotten Tomatoes (2025)

FAQs

Why did Elemental get such bad reviews? ›

Elemental is a movie that just doesn't stick out. Pixar made this one a unoriginal story of opposites attacting and families and community not wanting them together. Not much was stuff hadn't seen before. One of the things that did stick out to me was the animation.

To date, Leave No Trace holds the site's record, with a rating of 100% and 252 positive reviews.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Elemental is the perfect metaphor for Leftist views of diversity. Here you have a mostly peaceful and cohesive society filled with a diverse group of people from completely different backgrounds and cultures.

Little by little, however, the $200 million film became a hit, collecting nearly $500 million worldwide. For the year to date, “Elemental” ranks No. 9 on the list of top-grossing films, ahead of Marvel's latest “Ant-Man” sequel.

Elemental has two LGBTQ+ characters, but they are very, very minor characters. When Ember and Wade start to fall in love, Wade invites her to meet his family, which is quite an experience given that their apartment is flowing with water everywhere.

Our Call: Bottom line on Elemental: clunky concept, good message, great visuals.

On the film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, films that every surveyed critic considered bad have a 0% rating. As of 2023, only 40 films with more than 20 reviews have received this rating.

The 99% Club: An Ode to the Almost-Perfect Movie

The 99% Club: You'll find it, way past 98% on the Tomatometer, but just before 100%. Inside, a coterie of cinema's practically-finest, movies promising an experience beyond most others – movies that are almost perfect.

What is the longest film of all time? ›

The longest film ever made, according to Guinness World Records, is "The Cure for Insomnia" (1987), directed by John Henry Timmis IV.

Citizen Kane (1941) stood at number 1 for five consecutive polls, with 22 votes in 1962, 32 votes in 1972, 45 votes in 1982, 43 votes in 1992, and 46 votes in 2002. It also topped the first two directors' polls, with 30 votes in 1992 and 42 votes in 2002.

That movie found a single sharp metaphor for what its mother-daughter duo was going through, and allowed their real-world problems to inflect the movie's fantasy. Elemental, conversely, shoves what should be a relatable father-daughter relationship into a messy, hopelessly muddled metaphorical world.

The woke, occult content in ELEMENTAL is gratuitous. It adds nothing to the story and will annoy many family moviegoers who don't want their children exposed to such content. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises extreme caution.

Pixar's first non-binary character, Lake Ripple, belongs to the water element and is the younger sibling of Wade Ripple, the secondary protagonist in the film. In the movie, Lake briefly appears when Wade takes Ember home to introduce her to his family.

Elemental's racial allegories and dampened immigrant story

Elemental has received some criticism for its problematic racial allegories. In the film, the four elements—fire, water, air, and earth—are clearly racial metaphors. On the one hand, Elemental could've offered a very compelling discussion of racism.

Pixar is damaged as a big-screen brand. That was one of the rather glum takeaways from the weekend box office, which found “Elemental,” a $200 million-plus Pixar original, arriving to a disastrous $29.5 million in domestic ticket sales. “The Flash,” a Warner Bros.

What to Know. Elemental may not satisfy as fully as the greatest Pixar pictures, but it remains a solid story told with dazzling visual flair. With a heartwarming message and stunning animation, Elemental proves Pixar hasn't lost its touch.