Pixar should’ve known better, but Elemental (2023) has some marketing strategies that have led to one disturbing advertisement which is unsuitable for any family.
Nowadays, children’s movies or shows tend to have more crude humor or comments that would make adults laugh, but not affect kids. Sadly, the line between subtlety and ignorance has blurred for Pixar as their recent marketing has definitely gone too far.
Elemental isn’t making the best kind of records for Pixar anyways. In the first week, the movie opened with the worst box office opening for any Pixar movie, making around $30 million. Now, families who have gone to see the movie, love it and claim it to be one of the best Pixar movies in a long while. So what’s the problem? Marketing.
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Pixar may have thought they were being cool and doing something fun when creating this video, but Elemental turns one kid, Clod, into a “rizz god,” as some would say. Well, what’s rizz, and what does that have to do with anything? Rizz is slang for sweet-talking someone, and Clod is a kid trying to win over the main character, Ember with his charm. That might seem simple, but Pixar glorifies this by making a video that takes all of the scenes with Clod using his “rizz” to get Ember or someone else:
They made a “rizz” fan cam of Clod and then deleted it when one too many people asked why they did this with a child character
They made a “rizz” fan cam of Clod and then deleted it when one too many people asked why they did this with a child character
— nebula should have killed thanos (@gwenstacying) June 23, 2023
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This isn’t the only problem. Clod is also marketed as much, if not more, than the movie’s main characters, with only a few scenes. Why does Pixar make the character appear more important? No one can say, but, oddly, Clod’s actions are glorified in advertisements. It’s disturbing when you start to think about the age difference between the characters. Clod is just a little child while Ember is a young adult, so why is Pixar trying to have a kid get with an adult? Why are they advertising his charm?
In today’s culture, there are more and more cases of guys trying to sweet-talk girls into going out with them, and several of those instances never end well. Encouraging this behavior for someone to sweet-talk someone they shouldn’t be dating isn’t a family value, and while the movie doesn’t illustrate this point so heavily, advertising it for fans gives families the wrong idea for the movie and doesn’t actually help anyone be interested in watching the film.
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At the end of the day, it’s just supporting the behavior of a sexual predator by considering these actions as harmless and nothing to worry about, which is dangerous for a children’s movie to do. Pixar already removed the video from marketing, after parents began questioning the point of the video. Still, it’s clear that Pixar isn’t really caring what kids see these days, and that’s a disappointment.
Do you think Pixar needs to change its marketing strategies? Let Inside the Magic know what you think!
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