Pixar's Elemental

“I wanted to capture [my parents’ experiences] in the film, but I did it in a very dark way when my dad died,” Sohn tells Den of Geek magazine. “I definitely went off the rails. It was rage. I had [presented] a set of reels that were really dark, and no one on the team was connecting with it. That was a really dark place for me.”

Tragically, Sohn lost his mother near the end of the filmmaking process as well. It shook him to his core. But by that time, the project was in a more hopeful place, thanks to the support of his friends and coworkers at Pixar. They reminded him that his original vision for the film didn’t come from a place of anger, and he and the team were able to bring the ballad of Ember and Wade to a more optimistic place. “That darker aspect of the story is still part of the movie,” Sohn explains. “But as I started to find closure with my father, I started to find balance in the story to honor his experience without the story being about that. I wanted the story to be about inclusion and love.”

The preview footage shared with us by Pixar shows Ember’s parents immigrating to Element City, whose denizens are composed of either fire, water, land, or air. As they roam the city, societal friction between the fire and water residents is depicted, with Ember’s parents bristling at the fact that the city largely runs on water and isn’t as welcoming to their kind. Xenophobia and all it encompasses—racism, economic discrimination—are directly addressed within the greater metaphor. 

But as Sohn says, there’s much more to the story than that. Ember dreams of taking over the family convenience store, which serves as a cultural hub for the city’s fire community. Her aging father periodically coughs up ash and soot, clearly in the twilight of his career after putting in years of back-breaking work. In this respect, Sohn pays tribute to his parents’ sacrifices and the hard work they put into the Korean grocery store they opened in the Bronx, Sohn’s Fruits & Vegetables.

“My parents had come here from a foreign place to make a better life for [my siblings and I],” Sohn says. “They had gone through a war. They came to the country without knowing any English. There were a lot of obstacles for them.”

The unlikely romance between Ember and Wade is inspired by Sohn’s personal life as well, with the cultural clashes between the characters and their families reflecting his and his Italian-American wife’s experiences. “The toughest thing for me was that my parents and grandparents always said, ‘You have to marry a Korean,’” Sohn recalls. “With this film, we’re trying to find specificity in cultures not mixing right away or when empathy hasn’t been opened just yet.”

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