How Pixar’s Elemental Will Be Inspired By Director Peter Sohn’s Korean Immigrant Story
Among the many upcoming Disney movies coming our way in the next several months is Pixar’s latest film, Elemental. Following the animation studio previously heading into familiar territory with last summer’s Lightyear comes an original concept that will once again have us looking at everyday life in a whole new way. This time, we’ll be putting faces of the core four elements in nature: fire, water, air and earth, and see how they might interact with each other in a city of their own. As CinemaBlend learned during a press visit to Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California on Monday, the idea was inspired by the familial roots of longtime Pixar artist, filmmaker and voice actor Peter Sohn.
On behalf of CinemaBlend, I was among a group of journalists who got to check out the first footage of Elemental, which is a visual spectacle of creativity that interweaves Sohn’s experience of falling in love outside his culture. The director shared his influences for bringing elements to life for Pixar’s 27th feature-length animated feature with these words:
My parents came here from Korea in the late sixties, early seventies, to New York and they didn't have a lot of money. They had no family. They didn't speak any English and, but they managed to create a beautiful life here in the Bronx… I have so many memories of growing up in this shop and all my dad's customers came from everywhere and like my parents, they left their homes to come to a new land and they all were mixing into beautiful little neighborhoods with their cultures and the languages and so from that came this.
During the presentation, Sohn shared a photo of his late father in his younger years next to the grocery store called “Sohn’s Fruits & Vegetables” as he spoke following the movie itself echoing this. Elemental begins with a fire couple coming to a place called Element City where they settle in a neighborhood packed with flames of their kind and building a store called “The Fireplace” as they raise their daughter, Ember. As she grows up, she thinks she’s ready to run the store herself, but her father won’t hand over the keys until she learns to control her temper.
It’s a sweet setup for Elemental that becomes more dynamic when Ember unexpectedly meets a water person named Wade and must team up with him in order to save her father’s business. While Ember has a firecracker personality, Wade is constantly flooding with emotions, making them very much opposites. As Sohn continued:
Growing up my grandmother's dying words or like ‘Marry Korean, like we saw a little bit of that yesterday in the footage. It came from a real place. And, it created all these sort of culture clashes growing up. But, even with these sort of key pieces in place, we could go anywhere. The possibilities were endless, until we came up with the idea of opposites attracting, fire and water, these opposites, that became our clear focus of the film. And, once that was our North Star, we could adjust the characters, and obstacles that could happen to them.
Early in Elemental, this experience of Sohn’s is echoed through a moment when Ember’s grandmother’s dying words are for her to “Marry fire!” While the footage only exposed us to glints of chemistry forming between Ember and Wade, the Pixar movie looks to be centering itself as a love story along with being about family. Sohn also spoke to his inspiration for using elements as the vehicle for the narrative.
The idea of beautiful little neighborhoods, when I saw the periodic table of elements when I was a kid all I thought about was like that these were apartment complexes and that they all lived next to each other, Platinum then lives next to gold, but be careful of Mercury cuz they have toxic relationships or whatever… Stories of what these elements were doing in their apartments, you know, just mixing around in my head. And, then the last little piece was my wife and the experience of marrying someone that wasn't Korean.
The latest Elemental trailer offers a look at what to expect from the movie following us previously receiving our first glance at the film’s concept back in May. Check it out:
It’s incredibly relatable to fall for the person who doesn’t come from the same background as you, and Elemental looks like it will explore this while tied with being inspired by the immigration experience. As Pixar does, it’s going to get deep and have us in our feels, but also provide a really gorgeous and creative new concept only the animation studio could pull off.
Elemental hits theaters on June 16. Also on the way from the studio is Elio next spring and Inside Out 2 is set to come out one year after Elemental.
