'Elemental' director, Pixar veteran proves animation has the rare 'magic' to 'unite' us all

The stories being told through animation have come a long way, including advancements in technology, but one thing Elemental director, Pixar's Peter Sohn (now in theatres), highlights is the way animation can create a rare "universal" and "magical" storytelling experience.

“I've definitely seen it as a powerful thing, getting to step into a character’s shoes without this idea of skin colour or anything,” Sohn told Yahoo Canada in an interview in Toronto. “There is a universal sort of purity to it that can be magical in terms of connecting to a character wholeheartedly, without any barriers. Animation can do that like no other medium."

"That magic is rare nowadays for some reason. It's not gone but that idea of finding something that can just unite is something that I really love with animation.”

What is 'Elemental' about?

That "uniting" concept is very much at the heart of Sohn's film Elemental. With 23 years at Pixar, working in art, story, and animation departments on films like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and WALL.E, in addition to voice acting, Sohn is pushing forward Pixar's more inclusive, dynamic and emotional movies that move beyond the traditional child-centric stories told through the medium.

Elemental City is the setting for this new film, a community where fire, water, land and air beings all reside. The main character Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a spunky young woman who works at her family's store, which was started after Ember's parents immigrated to the city from Fire Land, with the hopes of having a more prosperous life.

While Elemental City is full of different beings, some don't really mix very well, like fire and water. When Wade (voiced by Mamoudou Athie) unexpectedly appears in Ember's life, putting Ember in a situation where she needs him to try to salvage her family's store, love between this unlikely pair evolves.

One important element of the story is that not all of these being are necessarily equal in this world, some have more difficulty than others to move around Elemental City. For example, Ember has to be careful interacting with water elements.

“That really came from understanding Ember’s journey and where the conflicts in her life were,” Sohn said. “So once we started with Ember as our main character, it's like, what would make it tough for her in the city?”

“Having a city that was built with a lot of water infrastructure, you just started naturally drawing that like, oh, that means water got here first. Now, where would they put a water thing? Oh, if it would meet with earth, that's a delta. ... So that hierarchy was just formed just based off of what Ember's journey would be.”

As Sohn recalled, these characters really just started from "doodles" in a sketchbook.

“All of a sudden, as you're just free flowing, finding where the pencil line’s taking you, this little fire character appeared,” he said. “It didn't look anything like Ember, but it was just this little flame with eyes and little legs that started, in your mind, walking around.”

As the film's director highlighted, this story that emerged between Ember and Wade was very much inspired by his personal life.

“It's connected to my own life of marrying someone or dating someone that wasn't Korean, which my parents wanted me to,” Sohn said. “There was a tension in there that started to resonate."

He added that the guiding light was always, "trying to thank our parents for all the work that they did to help raise us and all that implies, the different kinds of parents in our lives."

'Finding people that loved movies and loved animation formed the new race for me'

Being at Pixar for 23 years, taking on different roles in the company, Sohn has been able to see first-hand how storytelling through animation has evolved.

“I grew up in New York, there were a lot of racial issues and stuff, but finding people that loved movies and loved animation formed the new race for me, that was the tribe,” Sohn said. “So throughout the 23 years that I've been there, that love has never died in a lot of these people."

"You're with the same people for a long time. There's always an influx of new people, but you get to know some of these directors and artists for over 20 years, and getting to watch someone push themselves further into something new, is the sort of thing that you chase. ... I remember when [Andrew Stanton] did WALL.E and he asked a couple of story artists to help him with this beginning [with no dialogue]. ... All of a sudden that energy forms again. It doesn't always happen, but you're chasing for it.”

Of course, much of what Pixar has been able to achieve incorporates advancements in technology. Describing his evolving relationship with technology, Sohn refers to a quote from Yo-Yo Ma about how playing music is about "communicating emotion," and that's how Sohn feels about the technology at Pixar.

“You don't want to just find some cool technology and riff off of that, you want to find something that resonates, something that can push something that we can all feel,” Sohn said.