Elemental

Never, perhaps, has there been a movie so contrived in its concept. And that grand devotion to concept gets heavily in the way for the audience, almost to the point where the viewer is willing to give up on the thing. I say almost, because if one makes a conscientious effort to push through that superficial conceptual barrier, as well as the sense of indoctrination and being taught a lesson, you can strip things down to the story basics, which are well done and resonate with the viewer. Once you start paying attention to the characters as fundamental people, you can find the universality of the feelings and conflicts they act out, and the ham-handed metaphors for immigrants and parent-child conflict fades into the background. It helps, too, that the visuals present a certain amount of technical wonder, even in an era of an exceedingly refined state of the art in animation; you start to give credit to these characters for being real and alive and tangible, even as they are simply a highly digitized form of puppets. Distilled to its, shall we say, basic elements, this is a movie that I wanted to hate, but ultimately had to admire for its artistry and heart.