Ember’s character development has an eye-rolling triteness to it: Her salt-of-the-earth dad, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen), is training her to run his bodega after he retires, but she realizes that she actually wants to pursue an artistic career. Ember’s fire family is loud and brassy, devouring spicy food and yelling their feelings; Wade’s water folk are presented as painfully polite, cringey liberals, prone to sobbing over every mishap (because tears are made of liquid, you see). In every sense, the metaphor is screamingly obvious, as these magical, often beautifully animated element creatures behave exactly like human beings who have jobs, file taxes, and pay bills. Much of the plot revolves around the nuances of a building inspection, hardly the stuff of a typical Disney adventure. …

Pixar’s other biggest “blob movies” (in which the ensemble is mostly made up of abstract creations) are Inside Out and Soul, two well-received, Academy Award–winning films. In Inside Out, the colorful blob beings are emotions—Joy, Sadness, Anger—who live inside a young girl’s head, embodying her internal struggles as she navigates a painful cross-country move and the awkwardness of starting at a new school. It’s all tethered to something profoundly human, rather than a mere superficial imitation of our world.

[Er … maybe this is correct, but I don’t think that it’s really about blobs and blobbiness. I haven’t seen the film yet so all I can do is follow Sims’ argument here, but he’s describing a film with clichéd characters, mundane issues, virtually no real dramatic tension outside of the animation, with a plot line so hackneyed that it seems lifted from West Side Story by way of every dance movie ever made. Inside Out was incredibly touching because it told a very unusual and emotionally gripping story. This sounds like every Very Special Episode of 1980s sitcoms. — Ed]