Elemental

Dublin Core

Title

Elemental

Description

In a city filled with different air, earth, fire, and water elements, this story focuses on an immigrant fire family. When the daughter, Ember, eventually crosses paths with a water element named Wade. Despite the two coming from completely different backgrounds, they begin to fall in love.

Wade’s younger sibling, Lake, is credited as the first nonbinary character in a Pixar film, and is voiced by nonbinary voice actor Kai Ava Hauser. In the film, however, Lake’s nonbinary identity is not stated explicitly, and she is addressed with she/her pronouns. However, Lake is canonically nonbinary in some of Elemental’s related media. In the book Unlikely Friends (Rusu, 2023), their role is expanded further throughout the story, and their pronouns are exclusively they/them. 

Additionally, due to the characters being elementals there is an ambiguity in the character design. I have included androgyny and queer to reflect this aspect. If anyone who worked on the film can confirm whether there were supposed to be additional queer background characters (in particular the couples seen dancing in the park), please feel free to reach out, and I will adjust the categorization accordingly.

Source

Director: Peter Sohn
Year: 2023
Country: United States

Gender and Sexuality: Androgyny, nonbinary, queer
Animation Style: Digital
Genre: Comedy, drama, fantasy, romance
Type: Explicit, feature, implicit

Can currently be watched on Disney+ or YouTube: https://youtu.be/vDPFsuOBVZg

Files

Elemental.png

Citation

“Elemental,” Queer Animation, accessed May 12, 2024, https://queeranimation.omeka.net/items/show/215.