Pixar has debuted the first full trailer for its next imaginative animated movie this Tuesday. Although, having said that, not everyone is convinced Elemental is set to be as creative as the past greats from the legendary studio. As the trailer, which you can check out above, makes clear, the film is set in a city inhabited by beings made up of the four elements — air, water, earth, and fire. The story then sees two characters from two different groups making an unexpected connection.
Hang on a minute. A cute urban animated movie that’s actually celebrating societal diversity and exploring harmful prejudices? We’ve heard this one before. Yup, Elemental is giving everyone some serious Zootopia vibes, with the 2016 fan-favorite even trending on Twitter in the wake of the trailer’s release — as folks accuse it of simply being a low-rent ripoff of the earlier hit, except with elements replacing animals.
This GIF choice gets even funnier when you remember Zootopia‘s Breaking Bad gag.
But, hey, calling Elemental a Zootopia ripoff isn’t fair… It’s also ripping off Tangled.
… And possibly Soul and Coco too.
20 years can really drain a company’s creativity.
Others, meanwhile, are less concerned about the Zooptopia parallels as the deeper meaning of the story is really speaking to them.
As it happens, director Peter Sohn is fully aware of the seeming connections to Zootopia, and has offered a rebuttal as to why they’re just not accurate. For the filmmaker, the key difference in these two fictional communities lies in the absence of any segregation in Element City:
“It’s not like in Zootopia, where everything is disconnected from each other,” Sohn told Polygon. “It’s all about mixing,” Sohn says. “That’s what was so fun about this idea of: some elements can mix and some don’t. And what does that relationship look like? So water spilling onto earth people, that grows their plants. The idea of fire people needing wood to eat. There was a symbiotic relationship that they all needed to interconnect. And so we try to do that as much as we can in place. It’s not 100% everywhere, but it was definitely one of our building blocks.”
Fans will be the judge of whether Elemental is unique enough to be another Pixar classic once it releases this June 16. Either way, it’s clear Disney is desperately trying to recapture that sweet Zootopia magic, what with an actual Zootopia sequel recently being announced.