Pixar’s Elemental draws an interracial love story from a personal place

The trailer opens with the obvious: Pixar’s upcoming film Elemental isn’t just a fantasy movie in an elaborately imaginative setting: At heart, it’s an allegory about an interracial couple. Pixar movies have long dealt with heavy themes like grief and failure, so it’s not totally surprising that the studio’s latest movie would take a metaphorical approach to cross-cultural relationships — even if that isn’t territory that animated movies tend to explore, especially ones geared toward the whole family. However, Elemental takes place in a world far removed from our own, where anthropomorphized elements live in the zany Element City, the heart of the story comes from director Peter Sohn’s own experience.

Unlike Sohn’s previous directorial project, The Good DinosaurHe inherited the title of director from Pixar after Bob Peterson was fired due to creative difficulties. Elemental is a very personal movie, inspired by Sohn’s immigrant family and his cross-cultural relationship with his wife. Sohn decided to take a metaphorical approach, instead of making a movie about human experiences.

“One of my favorite things about animation is its universality. You can tell a story that can connect to so many people,” explains Sohn. “For my family, that was a big deal.” He says his mother in particular can connect to animated movies in a way she never was able to with live-action ones, where the characters never looked like her and her family. “[This universality in animation] has always been a big deal for me.”

We are creating the world of ElementalSohn, Denise Ream and her producer Denise Ream wanted to create a universal tale. That meant making sure the elemental characters and their cultures didn’t specifically correspond to existing cultures. The fire, earth, water, and air denizens of Element City — including the movie’s romantic leads, fiery Ember (Leah Lewis) and water elemental Wade (Mamoudou Athie) — share some similarities with real-life people, but they’re meant to be completely separate from our world.

Image: Pixar

“When I first started pitching it, there were things of my own life that I would make fun of in terms of like, Spicy food, oh my! Wouldn’t it be funny if fire food was really spicy?” says Sohn. But once people started asking, like, ‘Oh, are they Asian?’ — It was then that I realized: They cannot be universal..”

It was difficult to find the right balance. It was difficult to find that balance. However, if the filmmakers strayed from any human trait too much, then their characters would be too distant and alien to feel connected with the audience. Sohn and Ream deliberately disregarded any cultural connection by adding new components as counterbalances.

One big example was with the characters’ accents. Sohn believed it important to feature accents because he grew up around different accents. However, filmmakers deliberately avoided giving any accents. AllCharacters of one element share the same accent.

“We have an actor who’s Nigerian in the fire culture, but if you heard another Nigerian [there]You may be ready to start going. Oh, they’re all Nigerian, right?” says Sohn. “And so [we]It would be disrupted by moving, Oh, there’s a [fire person with a]Puerto Rican AccentYou could also use something like: We’re not trying to find the accent of a [particular] culture. But if that happens, it was about disrupting that.”

“And we did that with all of the elements,” adds Ream. “We were careful to do that from a casting perspective.”

A second aspect of the ethos is ElementalReams and Sohn made it a point to emphasize the value of family. The story could be a simple boy-meets-girl romantic comedy full of typical “opposites attract” hijinks. But to get to the core of the cultural clash, Sohn knew the movie had to expand to include Ember’s and Wade’s families.

Image: Pixar

“It was also a father and a daughter, and what that relationship was,” says Sohn. “So the initial concept was to try to make something universal — we could have part of that connection with these two [romantic leads as]Water and fire, but also understanding the family dynamic and culture. [their lives], to make the film larger.”

Sohn cites Kumail Nanjiani’s The Great SickThis is a great example of romantic comedy which also included an inter-racial couple and the blending of different cultures. These romantic comedies were inspired by many others, particularly those focused on the second generation of Americans. My Big Fat Greek Wedding Moonstruck. But they didn’t limit their influences to romantic comedies. Any movie involving the second-generation immigrant experience became a source of inspiration — including some very unlikely choices for a family-friendly animated movie.

“The Godfather trilogy — or, I should say, the [first] two movies — were huge inspiration from an immigration perspective,” Ream says.

Sohn also cites 2013’s The Immigrant, about a Polish woman (played by Marion Cotillard) immigrating to America in the 1920s, and 2015’s BrooklynSaoirse Ronan plays a young Irish immigrant from the 1950s in “The Irish Immigrant”. Even though those characters come from different countries in different time periods, Sohn noted that these movies — and many other American movies centered around immigration — shared one particular element, something he highlighted heavily in Elemental.

“The city is always a character,” says Sohn. “Whether it’s a romance or not.”

Elemental In theaters June 16