Pixar’s new film Elemental is so boring and unmemorable that it seems like a new low for the famed animation company. That’s impressive, considering that Pixar has already had quite a fall from it’s early glory days, slavishly following Disney Studios down the money-grubbing rathole, ruining its sterling reputation through bad sequels, cynical merchandizing, and a general anything-for-a-buck mentality.

I’m no fan of the Pixar style myself — too much ideologically poisoned Disneyfied nostalgia and sentimental slop weighing down fantastically talented animators — but even I can appreciate the more dazzling aspects of Toy Story (1995), The Incredibles (2004) Ratatouille (2007), and Coco (2017).

But Elemental, directed by Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur), is shockingly formulaic. It seems Sohn based the film’s premise on his own experience as the son of Korean immigrants, who ran a store in the Bronx in the 1970s. But even so, it’s impossible not to recognize that the Elemental narrative is a tired, retreaded variation on Inside/Out (2015). That Pixar film portrayed the basic emotions as contending characters representing Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Their tech job is to manage via computer consoles the emotional life of a young girl, within the complex social system of her being.