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The world-building of Pixar’s “Elemental” was a major selling point in Cynthia Vinney’s review of the film for Looper. The vast array of characters and their respective cultures really stand out in the movie, and Peter Sohn and his team took great care to flesh out these roles without assigning them attributes of specific groups of people in the real world. Sohn explained how his process started originally, “When I first started pitching it, there were things of my own life that I would make fun of in terms of like, ‘Oh, I love spicy food. Wouldn’t it be funny if fire food was really spicy?’—that kind of thing and all that kind of fun.”
This soon presented problems when people assumed fire or air people were stand-ins for real-world cultures. Sohn realized a slightly different approach was needed to make the story work: “Quickly I realized these have to be universal. My biggest goal was to try to take the element itself and pull from there to make the culture.” This required a fine mix of the extraordinary and the grounded. Going too far into obscure elemental references could’ve alienated viewers, but Sohn went on to discuss how he found an ideal balance, “Something that was really interesting was disruption—meaning there is a piece of a culture that you think is mixed with the fire element on top, and then the next one should take you into another place where it’s giving you other values of cultures that we know—but without it pointing to anything.”
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Pixar has done an exceptional job of merging abstract concepts with applicable themes to the real world. By all accounts, “Elemental” should see great praise when it comes out in theaters on June 16.
