I love that other people have watched this version and enjoyed the same mystery kid bonus commentary. I also like when a different kid just starts crying the moment we ever see any of the weird tree people.
The fantasy premise of this movie and some of the world building, especially the fact that it includes a conlang and a distinct style to its soundtrack other than the one all other Disney things use, are cool and it really could have been something.
But the story just has no stakes at all, nothing that happens is a challenge for the characters to resolve and there's almost nothing children could conceivably find interesting. I can confirm what was said in another post that this movie is primarily about a business violating city ordinances.
And I said it wasn't a "bad" movie but now that my brain is done processing it, okay, in this movie, fire people are minority immigrants in a city dominated by water people. Fire people are outright banned from some public spaces even though water is actually deadlier to them than the reverse. The city is so built for mostly water, air and earth people that fire people need umbrellas in order to not die on any normal day and the city doesn't care to fix a problem that regularly floods the streets.
Meanwhile, water boyfriend's family are rich upper class, and water boyfriend most importantly *is the city worker who writes up the zoning violations,* which is not a "secret" with a reveal later but exactly how fire girl meets him. She knows this up front and watches him pass the paperwork on to his boss while he apologizes to her and cries about how bad it feels (crying over everything is the comedy angle of the water people) Oh but his rich family are racist about her too right? It's about an interracial relationship in defiance of both sides and all social norms of their world?
No, we never see that it's a controversial subject in-universe. Water guy's family love his fire girlfriend immediately and are such progressive liberals they even have a lesbian daughter according to 5 seconds of the film!
The *only* character who has to learn a lesson of tolerance is the fire dad, an immigrant small business owner whose race is disrespected, profiled and endangered constantly by water people, and he's not even written as outright racist about it anyway, just kind of a lovably snarky grump (towards rude water people, In every instance shown) who doesn't put up with bullshit, you know like his daughter is dating the rich white - sorry, water - softboy who ratted out a low income immigrant's family business to the state???
It all gets absolutely effortlessly resolved either way though. All conflict is far too mild throughout.
Some cool people worked on this movie and even post here, concept artists and one of the conlang's developers! But at the very least I feel like a whole lot more context had to have been cut by studio heads to make it all softer and sweeter and in the process the intended message was mangled in a really, really unfortunate way. You can tell by just that worldbuilding, the whole city inherently hostile to the fire race, that there was strong social commentary going into the ideas.
There's even some details that should have been much much bigger to the whole plot and some ideas that are genuinely fascinating to consider (water, air and earth all benefit eachother in more obvious ways than fire benefits any of them, fire has a destructive reputation but can sculpt glass which the city is made of) but they're completely underutilized.
And it sucks more because I was wrong that the setting itself would be boring; instead of looking exactly like our world it is actually beautifully conceived and lovingly detailed, everyone in the art department did great and the final film just doesn't do them justice.
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
jacobvanloon
romaincrisis
snowghoul
origamiaround
baratheonpilled
