As people may have guessed from the opening trailer, Pixar’s upcoming movie Elementary is not just a fantasy film in a highly imaginative setting: essentially it is an allegory about an interracial couple. Pixar films have long dealt with heavy themes of grief and failure, so it’s not entirely surprising that the studio’s latest film would take a metaphorical approach to cross-cultural relationships – even if that’s not the territory animated films often explore, especially ones aimed at on the whole family. While Elementary set in a world far removed from our own, where anthropomorphic elements live in the wacky Element City, the core of the story comes from director Peter Sohn’s own experience.
Unlike Sohn’s previous directorial project, The good dinosaurwhich he subsequently inherited Pixar removed Bob Peterson as a director due to creative struggles, Elementary is a very personal film, inspired by Sohn’s immigrant family and his cross-cultural relationship with his wife. But instead of making a film about people going through a similar experience, Sohn deliberately chose a metaphorical approach.
“One of my favorite things about animation is its universality. You can tell a story that resonates with so many people,” explains Sohn. “For my family, that was a big problem.” He says his mother in particular can connect to animated movies in a way she never could with live-action movies, where the characters never resembled her and her family. “[This universality in animation] has always been a big problem for me.”
In creating the world of Elementary, Sohn and producer Denise Ream were determined to tell a universal story. That meant making sure that the elemental characters and their cultures didn’t specifically match existing cultures. The fire, earth, water, and air inhabitants of Element City — including the film’s romantic protagonists, fiery Ember (Leah Lewis) and water elemental Wade (Mamoudou Athie) — share some similarities with real humans, but they’re meant to be completely being separated from our world.
Image: Pixar
“When I first started pitching it, there were things in my own life that I mocked, like, Oh, I like spicy food. Wouldn’t it be funny if fire food was really spicy?Son says. But when people started asking, like, “Oh, are they Asian?” — quickly, I realized, No, no, these must be universal.”
Finding that balance was difficult. If the filmmakers leaned too much on familiar human traits, the characters would lose their sense of universality. But if they strayed too far from anything human, their leads would feel too foreign and distant to connect with the audience. So Sohn and Ream ended up deliberately distorting any apparent cultural association by counterbalancing new elements.
A great example was with the accents of the characters. It was important to Sohn that the film featured accents, as he had grown up around people with different accents. But at the same time, the filmmakers very consciously avoided giving all characters from one element have the same accent.
“We have an actor who is Nigerian in fire culture, but if you heard another Nigerian [there]you could start to go, Oh, they are all Nigerian, right?” says Son. “And so [we] would disturb it to go on, Oh, there’s one [fire person with a] Puerto Rican accent, or the like. We are not trying to find the accent of a [particular] culture. But when that happens, it was about disrupting that.”
“And we did that with all the elements,” adds Ream. “We were careful to do that from a casting perspective.”
Another facet of Elementary one thing that Ream and Sohn certainly emphasized was the importance of family. The story could be a simple romantic comedy between boy and girl, full of typical ‘opposites attract’ jokes. But to get to the heart of the cultural clash, Sohn knew the film had to expand to include Ember and Wade’s families.
Image: Pixar
“It was also a father and a daughter, and what that relationship was,” says Sohn. “So the original concept was to try and make something universal — we could have some of that connection with these two [romantic leads as] fire and water, but then also understand the family dynamic, and that cultural part of it [their lives]to make the movie bigger.”
Sohn quotes Kumail Nanjiani’s The big sick as a good example of a romantic comedy that also has an interracial relationship and a mixing of cultures. The filmmakers drew on many other romantic comedies, particularly those aimed at second-generation Americans My Fat Greek Wedding And hit by the moon. But they didn’t limit their influence to romantic comedies. Every film about the second-generation immigrant experience became a source of inspiration – including some very unlikely choices for a family-friendly animated film.
“The Godfather trilogy – or, I should say, the [first] two movies — were huge inspiration from an immigration perspective,” says Ream.
Sohn also cites that of 2013 The immigrantabout a Polish woman (played by Marion Cotillard) who emigrated to America in the 1920s and 2015 Brooklyn, which stars Saoirse Ronan as a young Irish immigrant in the 1950s. While those characters come from different countries in different time periods, Sohn noted that these films – and many other American films about immigration – shared a certain element, something he emphasized strongly in Elementary.
“The city is always a character,” says Sohn. “Whether it’s a romance or not.”
Elementary will be in cinemas from June 16.