Pixar’s Elemental draws an interracial love story from a personal place
As people have guessed from the opening trailer,Pixar’s upcoming film Elemental isn’t just a fantasy movie in an elaborately imaginative setting: At heart, it’s an allegory about an interracial couple. Pixar movies have long dealt with heavy themes like grief and failure, so it’s not totally surprising that the studio’s latest movie would take a metaphorical approach to cross-cultural relationships — even if that isn’t territory that animated movies tend to explore, especially ones geared toward the whole family. While Elemental takes place in a world far removed from our own, where anthropomorphized elements live in the zany Element City, the heart of the story comes from director Peter Sohn’s own experience.
Unlike Sohn’s previous directorial project, The Good Dinosaur, which he inherited after Pixar removed Bob Peterson as director due to creative struggles, Elemental is a very personal movie, inspired by Sohn’s immigrant family and his cross-cultural relationship with his wife. But instead of making a movie about humans going through a similar experience, Sohn deliberately went for a metaphorical approach.
“One of my favorite things about animation is its universality. You can tell a story that can connect to so many people,” explains Sohn. “For my family, that was a big deal.” He says his mother in particular can connect to animated movies in a way she never was able to with live-action ones, where the characters never looked like her and her family. “[This universality in animation] has always been a big deal for me.”
In creating the world ofElemental, Sohn and producer Denise Ream were determined to tell a universal story. That meant making sure the elemental characters and their cultures didn’t specifically
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