My unintentional movie theme last weekend turned out to be connections, as both movies I chose were about making connections in unexpected places.

First up, Pixar’s latest, Elemental, which was absolutely lovely and moving, in typical Pixar fashion. It’s set in a world in which the elements — earth, air, fire, water — are personified. A Fire family that resettled in Elemental City after a disaster in their homeland opens a shop that they plan to hand over to their daughter. She thinks that’s what she wants, but she’s never quite ready to take it over, since she has issues with customers. But then she has to team up with a Water city inspector in order to save her father’s business. Fire and Water aren’t supposed to be able to mix, but they form a powerful connection that makes her reconsider a lot of things. It’s essentially a rom-com fantasy Romeo and Juliet story (but Pixar, so not a tragedy).

There’s a documentary feature about this, Good Chemistry, that explains a lot of the background of the story. The writer/director is the son of immigrants who opened a store they planned to pass on to him, but he wanted to be an animator, much to their dismay. A lot of that makes it into the story. It’s essentially a story about the experience of being the child of immigrants. But it’s also about assumptions we make about people, including those close to us, and having to be true to ourselves. I’m not a daughter of immigrants (I’m something like fourth generation, and all we really retain is the name), but I related to a lot of things in this movie. My parents are very practical people, and the only things I was ever really interested in involved the arts, the sorts of fields where there aren’t clear entry-level jobs and career paths, so there was a lot of clashing over what I wanted to do vs. “get a degree you can get a job in” (and I ended up not getting a job with the degree that I was supposed to be able to get a job in and instead working in one of those fields without a clear career path). So, yeah, this one hit.

Then there was Flora and Son on Apple. It’s from the same filmmaker who did Once, and it’s another slice-of-life Dublin music story. Flora is a struggling single mom with a rebellious teen son. In an attempt to connect with him and give him a positive outlet, she gives him a guitar, but when he rejects it, she signs up for online guitar lessons for herself from a guy in Los Angeles. What she learns about music and songs from him helps her connect with her son, who’s into rap and electronic music, and helps her rediscover herself, something she’d lost. The promos make it look like a romance, and while there is a romantic element, it really isn’t a romance. The main relationship is between the mother and the son.

The movie is pretty much a love letter to the power of music. The lead actress (the daughter of Bono from U2, so I guess she came by the musical talent honestly) has a beautifully expressive face. There’s one scene in which her guitar teacher has sent her a link to a video of Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now.” She starts it playing and starts doing other stuff with that in the background, but you can see on her face when the words of the song hit her and she just freezes to listen to it. Every emotion the song brings out flickers across her face.

I may have lost a little of the impact of the movie because just as it was building to the climactic scene, that was when I had to deal with the stolen car crashing into my garage, and now I’m afraid that incident will be forever linked to this movie in my mind. It’s not normally my sort of thing (way too few wizards), but I still quite enjoyed it. I did have to turn on the subtitles because the Dublin accents are really heavy.

Now I have to decide what to watch this weekend. We’re finally getting something like real fall weather, so I want something with good autumn vibes.