Filmmaker Peter Sohn Talks About the Culture Clash and Diversity in His Own Life That Translated Into His Upcoming Pixar Film ELEMENTAL

Pixar animator and filmmaker Peter Sohn has been working on Disney Pixar films for over two decades, fully taking the reins directing the short Partly Cloudy (2009) and the feature The Good Dinosaur (2015). Sohn is about to take on another film, titled Elemental, which strikes a personal chord that reflects his life.

The director presented a mini-masterclass on the film at the Disney Content Showcase in Singapore this past Wednesday, and he talked a lot about his family. He showed a picture on the screen of himself as a little boy with his Korean immigrant parents in New York. He talked about their love of film, and how he translated movies for them as a child, but they didn’t need him to translate the animated films, as they conveyed so much emotion that they could easily follow. This set him on the path of animated filmmaker, and his relationship with his wife gave him the idea for Elemental.

He explained:

“I married someone that wasn’t Korean, and there was a lot of culture clash with that in my world. And that brought to me to this idea of finding opposites. And the question of what if fire fell in love with water came. As an animator, what could be a fun world to play with… so the fire and water is one thing. But then tying that to culture clash, was part of that metaphor. And then in that world, all of a sudden this idea of sacrifice, and understanding what our parents had given started to make the soup of what this film is.”

When he was asked what animators should be doing in the face of an unpredictable audience who have a vast array of content to choose from, as Disney’s latest, Strange World, has been largely underperforming in theaters.

Sohn said:

“I’ve just always responded to really heartfelt, sincere movies and storytelling, with characters that I can really fall in love with, and hopefully empathize with, and finding characters that have that vulnerability so that I can jump in with them, is a goal of mine and the type of movies that I love. And as an animator, trying to find ways to make that universal.”

Actors Mamoudou Athie (Jurassic World: Dominion) and Leah Lewis (Half of It) are voicing the character Wade (water) and Ember (fire), respectively. The movie follows the journey of the unlikely pair Ember and Wade, “in a city where fire, water, land, and air residents live together. The fiery young woman and the go-with-the-flow guy are about to discover something elemental: how much they actually have in common.”

I look forward to the animated movies that Disney puts out. My kids usually make sure we see them, and we tend to have a great time watching them together. You can check out the first teaser trailer for the film here, and you can watch Elemental when it releases in theaters on June 16, 2023.

via: Variety