Big release for this summer, “Elemental” is Pixar’s 27th animated feature film. pandemic and the commercial failure of “Buzz Lightyear”, while its rivals flourish at the box office. Inspired by director Peter Sohn’s experiences as the son of immigrants from Korea, this is a story of friendship and later love (something rare in the Pixar story) in the City of Elements, where residents of fire, water, earth and air live, between Ember (Spark in the Portuguese version), a quick-witted and impetuous young woman of “fire”, and Wade (Nilo in the ‘translation’), a fun, sentimental and relaxed “water” boy, with the background of emigration and the expectations of parents with their children. from the short film “Partly Cloudy” (2009) and who debuted in feature films with “The Good Dinosaur” (2015), he said that the inspiration to use the elements as characters came when he started “scribbling things” to find out where they would take him and ended up “stumbling” on the fire ones, which then led to the idea of a water one.” I could feel the conflict and fun that could come from that. But it also started to link to my own life with my wife, having married someone who wasn’t Korean. And the cultural shock that this created with my own family”, he explained. He deepened the context: “When I was growing up, I didn’t appreciate all the things my parents had gone through. One war and they came to the US without knowing anything about English. And they faced a lot of obstacles that I, a kid growing up in New York, just didn’t understand or empathize with. And as I get older and with each ephemeris that passes, I am more amazed at what they managed to do with so little and that I, as a father, could not do now. And that gratitude became what held all parts of the film together.”Peter Sohn had to deal precisely with the death of his parents during production: the parent when the project was taking shape at a very early stage of development, the mother close from the end: “I didn’t know how much it would affect this production […]. I don’t know if it was because of education, but I just kept working non-stop. […] I put as much love and dedication as I could into honoring them”. ” data-title=””Elemental”: Pixar’s new film is a love story between fire and water in a hopeful tone – SAPO Mag”>
Unsurprisingly, transferring the elements to animation turned out to be a complex task, starting with the protagonist’s “fire”. Creating Ember was a very difficult problem, but the most exciting thing was seeing her come to life for the first time, because she was our main character and carried the burden of the story”, says the director, who assumed that it was his favorite of “Elemental” and that the “temperamental” protagonist and the “emotional” Wade mirror the personalities of his wife, of origin Italian, and himself. Honestly, we could make a good horror movie with these images”. from a visual effects standpoint” and added layers to make Wade captivating, a challenge when “trying to create an interpretation” of something whose nature is… reflective.” If you really look at the water, it can be any color of the rainbow because it’s a mirror. So we were dealing with those same problems when lighting it”, added the director. Interestingly, “Partly Cloudy” turned out to be a first “experience” with “air”: the short he made for Pixar in 2009, shown in theaters before “Up – Highly!”, it was about clouds that create babies and deliver them to their parents via storks. And Peter Sohn highlights evolution: “I love this Pixar idea of trying to find a moving story while making advance technology. I love the weather, I love nature, and this air character concept was just something I thought hadn’t been animated before. Back then, we didn’t have the technology to really get that quality, but now we do.” Director Peter Sohn and Producer Denise Ream” data-title=””Elemental”: Pixar’s new film is a love story between fire and water in a tone of hope – SAPO Mag”> Director Peter Sohn and producer Denise Ream The City of Elements is a metropolis that you enter through the port in the first few seconds of the film, ugly in the image of large port cities known for emigration flows, such as Venice, Amsterdam and, of course, New York (“a great inspiration”). But the director clarifies that they “scoured” almost everything, from buildings in Brazil to the Middle East: “We saw architecture from all over the world. We were looking a lot at port cities, in terms of trying to find ports of call.” entry to a country, understanding how a country welcomes people from other immigration hubs around the world. And that was just for the port, but also for iconic buildings that looked romantic, beautiful or memorable. We were there for literally seven years in this film”. “Elemental” has other influences, since, explains Peter Sohn, “here we are all cinephiles and we always like to be inspired by films”. For example, for the love story between Ember and Wade, the duo cites comedies romantics like “Moonspell”, with Cher and Nicolas Cage; “Vira-se Gregos Para Casar”, with Nia Vardalos; and even “Shall We Dance?” (the original Japanese version, they insist on specifying, don’t get confused with the ‘remake’ with Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jennifer Lopez).”For every layer, there was some film that would become a source of inspiration”, emphasizes the director, with his production company giving the first two “The Godfather”, by Coppola, as an example for emigration and expectations and family dynamics. filmed and showed their own metropolises, namely from the cinema of Jean-Pierre Jeunet: “The City of Lost Children” (1995), co-directed with Marc Caro, and “The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie”. This is “a very colorful film with many different communities” and that’s what was “fun” to create. Despite acknowledging that he and his parents had experiences of xenophobia in New York (“more personal than political”, he guaranteed) and that the themes are very personal to him, Peter Sohn rejects political interpretations: the general tone of “Elemental” , he defends, is of “hope”.TRAILER.