Pixar vs. Jewish Continuity

An animated children's movie with a surprising goal

It’s the last week of summer vacation, my wife said. Let’s do movie night with the younger kids, she said.

I had heard that Pixar/Disney came out with a new movie. Pixar have made some of the best animated films - Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, A Bug’s Life, Up, Wall-E, Onward, Inside Out, and more. They are all fantastic stories, with great messages, perfectly executed. Innocent stuff, suitable for a young Jewish audience. And so deciding to watch their new movie, Elemental, was a no-brainer. I’d heard that it was set in a world inhabited by anthropomorphized personifications of the four elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water. The Fire characters are literally made of fire and can set things on fire; the Water characters can change form at will; the Earth characters grow things on their bodies; the Air characters waft through the air. I didn’t know anything more than that, but it sounded great!

Goodness, did I get a shock.

The entire movie was a promotion for intermarriage.

No, I’m not exaggerating. It began with a married Fire couple of a Fire religion, who speak a foreign language, fleeing suffering in their country by taking a ship to a gleaming new metropolis, Element City. They change their names at immigration to names that are pronounceable in English, but still suffer from anti-Fireism by the other elements. Their daughter, Ember, grows up Americanized, but still loyal to her parent’s fiery tradition and determined to continue their family fire business.

Then Ember meets a Water guy named Wade and starts to fall in love with him. At first, she thinks that it’s a relationship that can never get anywhere - after all, she is Fire and he is Water. Ember is afraid that touching him will result in her death. And her parents are furious at the mere idea of it. They say that their flame will be physically and conceptually extinguished. But finally, they all realize that love conquers all, that Ember intends to keep the family fire burning even though she’s abandoning the family business, and she is united with him forever (and miraculously isn’t extinguished by physical contact). It ends with the daughter and father exchanging a rite of religious respect, showing that her father understood that she wasn’t betraying their religion.

I was rather taken aback that a film’s entire message would be to promote intermarriage. (I subsequently discovered that the director is Korean and intended it to be about Asian immigrants, but it’s equally applicable to Jews.) And it neatly avoided discussing the challenges and problems with it. For example, what elements would their kids be? A dilution of Fire and Water wouldn’t have the strengths of either!

And if intermarriage between Earth, Air, Fire and Water becomes acceptable, how long does it take before the divisions disappear entirely? Sure, if your goal is a melting pot then it doesn’t matter so much, and it’s better to have everyone be the same. But the premise of the film was that the unique characteristics of the elements were actually valuable. How would these characteristics remain, if they are blended out of existence?

What will Pixar come up with next? Assimilating Nemo? Shiksas Inc? Goy Story?