Elemental shakes up the Zootopia formula with an immigrant story, says director Peter Sohn

polygon.com:

The trailers for Pixar’s Elemental introduce a big, bustling city full of colorful inhabitants. Disney fans were quick to make comparisons to Zootopia, Disney Animation’s 2016 film also set in a big, bustling city full of colorful inhabitants. Some differences are obvious — instead of animals, Pixar’s summer release breaks down the population into fire, water, earth, and air people — but as Polygon learned from director Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur, the voice of Sox in Lightyear) during a visit to Pixar in March, the creative choices behind Elemental’s Element City go beyond the residential.

“It’s not like in Zootopia, where everything is disconnected from each other,” Sohn says. Instead, like New York City, Element City is built upon the idea of different people all coming together in a big melting pot of cultures. So instead of separate neighborhoods like in Zootopia, for the most part, all the elements live side by side.

“It’s all about mixing,” Sohn says. “That’s what was so fun about this idea of: some elements can mix and some don’t. And what does that relationship look like? So water spilling onto earth people, that grows their plants. The idea of fire people needing wood to eat. There was a symbiotic relationship that they all needed to interconnect. And so we try to do that as much as we can in place. It’s not 100% everywhere, but it was definitely one of our building blocks.”

At its core, Elemental is an immigrant story following Ember (Leah Lewis), the daughter of two fire people who emigrate from an unspecified fire land and look to build their lives in Element City. Sohn was inspired by his parents’ journey from South Korea to the Bronx in the 1970s. While most of Element City is built in a synergistic