Elemental Director Explains How Fun & Risky It Was To Create Each Element's Culture

"Elemental" may follow anthropomorphous embodiments of fire, water, air, and earth, but it's grounded in genuine human emotion. Director Peter Sohn has spoken at length about how he drew from his own experiences as a Korean growing up in America and marrying someone outside his culture to inform the plot of the latest Pixar flick. Using characters that are polar opposites, like fire and water, to represent what he went through results in something that's both whimsical and relatable. 

All of this gets wrapped up in classic rom-com fashion, with Ember (Leah Lewis) and Wade (Mamoudou Athie) trying to make a relationship work. But that thread, combined with his own experiences, allowed Sohn to do something truly unique. As he told Gizmodo, "It's not just, like, a boy meeting a girl. It was also a father and a daughter and what that relationship was. And so the initial concept was to try to make something universal—that we can have part of that connection with these two, fire and water, but then also understanding the family dynamic and that cultural part of this to make the film larger."

Sohn went on to discuss how much fun it was to build out cultures for fire, water, and air people. However, this also presented challenges so as not to directly correlate a fictional group with a real one.

The world-building of Pixar's "Elemental" was a major selling point in Cynthia Vinney's review of the film for Looper. The vast array of characters and their respective cultures really stand out in the movie, and Peter Sohn and his team took great care to flesh out these roles without assigning them attributes of specific groups of people in the real world. Sohn explained how his process started originally, "When I first started pitching it, there were things of my own life that I would make fun of in terms of like, 'Oh, I love spicy food. Wouldn't it be funny if fire food was really spicy?'—that kind of thing and all that kind of fun."

This soon presented problems when people assumed fire or air people were stand-ins for real-world cultures. Sohn realized a slightly different approach was needed to make the story work: "Quickly I realized these have to be universal. My biggest goal was to try to take the element itself and pull from there to make the culture." This required a fine mix of the extraordinary and the grounded. Going too far into obscure elemental references could've alienated viewers, but Sohn went on to discuss how he found an ideal balance, "Something that was really interesting was disruption—meaning there is a piece of a culture that you think is mixed with the fire element on top, and then the next one should take you into another place where it's giving you other values of cultures that we know—but without it pointing to anything."

Pixar has done an exceptional job of merging abstract concepts with applicable themes to the real world. By all accounts, "Elemental" should see great praise when it comes out in theaters on June 16.