Light My Fire

Elemental’s Peter Sohn on making his most personal Pixar movie

“FIRST OF ALL, NOTHING ABOUT this movie was easy,” Peter Sohn, the longtime Pixar creative, tells an audience. Someone has just asked about how The Good Dinosaur’s director incorporated political themes into Elemental, his new animation about Ember – a shopkeeper’s daughter made of fire – falling in love with a city inspector, Wade, who’s made of water. The two live in the wonderfully colourful Elemental City, but because of their clashing elemental natures they do not normally mix.

“The themes of the film are very personal for me,” Sohn continues. “My experiences of growing up in New York and some of the xenophobia that my parents and I faced were all issues that were personal, all things that I, to this day, struggle with. But that’s on the darker side. This movie is meant to be a very hopeful one.”

For Sohn, whose parents moved from Korea to New York City before he was born, almost everything about Elemental is based on some personal truth. He likens the overly emotional Wade to himself and the fiery spirit of Ember to his Italian-American wife. At one point in the movie, Ember’s grandmother tells her that she must “marry fire”, which is lifted directly from Sohn’s own grandmother telling him to “marry Korean”. Yet this story of romance and family is told in perhaps the most abstract way possible – through a funny, technically ambitious animated romance that features zero humans.