At its core, Elemental is mostly a love story – between the daughter of an immigrant family who built a shop from scratch and the son of a wealthy family who discuss modern art in their penthouse. But their social backgrounds aren’t the biggest difference between the two: the 27th Pixar feature is set in Elemental City, where creatures of fire, water, earth and air coexist as peacefully as possible – and Ember is a fire girl who has a crush on water boy Wade of all people…
But the elemental protagonists are not only the template for nearly endless creative ideas in the design of the mega-metropolis Elemental City, they also have presented Pixar’s animation experts with a previously unknown challenge – which is exactly what FILMSTARTS editor-in-chief Christoph Petersen talks about in the “Elemental” interview with director Peter Sohn (“Arlo & Spot”) and producer Denise Ream (“Cars 2”):
MOVIE BEGINS:
Denise Ream: My ranking is: earth, air, fire, water. Water in particular turned out to be surprisingly difficult during the work.
Peter Sohn (laughs): That’s right, I see it that way too.
MOVIE BEGINS:
peter son: I’m very happy to hear that. The process was really difficult. When we first turned on our fire effect, Ember looked like the Balrog from The Lord of the Rings. She seemed demonic – and of course that wasn’t possible. We wanted a face that was fun to stare at, but if it got too abstract, you lost the sense that she could really set things on fire. It was important to find the right balance – and that required completely new technologies!
MOVIE BEGINS:
peter son: the last!
Denise Ream: We really had to juggle a lot of things during production to get everything right in the end…
Why are Pixar movies so expensive?
MOVIE BEGINS:
Denise Ream: Elemental is different from other Pixar films – because of the protagonists, virtually every shot is an effect shot. This adds an extra level of complexity and just needs more people. We’ve been in production for seven years – and that’s because of the technical challenges of the project. It took more time. Hopefully we can enthuse people with that, because we really wanted to deliver something unique.
peter son: There was no production pipeline for it yet, so we had to build it from scratch first. At Pixar, a lot is designed for plastic toys or metal cars – but in “Elemental” there are almost no flat surfaces, instead many things like water or fire are also a bit transparent – and such a new production pipeline also costs a lot of money from money.
MOVIE BEGINS: Upstairs
peter son: I like Up, I worked on the movie. But may I say it was a direct example? Don’t know. It was first and foremost about honoring my parents’ experience – and also the experience of many crew members’ parents. My parents are a major source of inspiration – and I get very emotional every time I think about how hard it must have been for them to travel all the way and come to this country.
MOVIE BEGINS:
peter son: My favorite pun? I love them – if you have any good ones, give them to me, I’m always open to that…
“Elemental” will run exclusively in German cinemas from June 22, 2023 – and here you will find the cinema program for “Elemental”.