How Pixar's Elemental Is One Big Letter of Gratitude to the Director's Parents

(SPOT.ph) It's a familiar sight to many: a parent slumped over the table, having fallen asleep after (or during) an exhausting day at work. Talk about a parent's love. And no matter how familiar, no matter how often that scene is played out in so many times and in so many ways, it will never be enough to encapsulate it all—exactly one of the roots of Elemental, the latest Pixar and Disney movie to drop in cinemas and on our emotionally-draught hearts.

Also read: 10 of the Most Touching Pixar Shorts and Their Backstories

Elemental picks up along the same vein as Up, Inside Out, with a dash of epic worldbuilding akin to Zootopia. Think hitting those emotions and that fantastical world at the same time, the way only a Disney and Pixar movie can. In this one, we follow Ember Lumen (voiced by The Half of It's Leah Lewis) through Element City, as she finds a place for herself outside of Fire Town and her family's convenience store. This all starts after having bumped into Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a sappy water element who ends up in Fire Town by accident. The two are about as opposite as opposite can be; different parts of town, different element, all that, or at least, they seem to be entirely different.

How the story of director Peter Sohn ended up inspiring Elemental

There is a moment in the movie when Ember comes home from doing deliveries and finds her dad, Bernie (voiced by Ronnie del Carmen) asleep in their shop, pen still in hand. "As a daughter, she takes the pen out carefully and puts the shawl (over him). I get very emotional about it, just because I remember my dad working so hard and just being asleep at whatever he was doing," director Peter Sohn shares in a virtual interview with SPOT.ph. He identifies more firmly with Wade when it comes to personality, so we don't doubt he's overselling the "emotional" bit at all.

Sohn, whose parents migrated from Korea to New York City in the '60s and owned a store in the Bronx, shares that a lot of Ember's experience in the movie is based on his own. It's all in the little details, from the Lumen's names being changed to more, erm, English-pronunciation friendly ones as they enter through Element City's Ellis Island, all the way down to big ones like their apprehension to step out of Fire Town. 

The seeds for Elemental were planted years ago, says the director. "Some of these pieces of the story started when I was in high school and some other things started when I was dating someone that wasn't Korean."  Officially, the team started work on the movie around seven years ago; that's how long it's been in the making. 

Throughout those years, Sohn explains that what kept him pushing was "really just thanking our parents for all the work that they had done. It was just such a simple, honest, sincere gratitude that I will carry until the day that I die. It's just this thing that you have when you realize that as an adult that I couldn't shake. I couldn't shake it."

In the same way that the story of our parents doing all they can to ensure our future and safeguard us, that gratitude Sohn felt can also come in many different ways. "It's been boiled down to this thing that I'm telling you right now, but it takes many shapes and forms for me."

"But the movie just isn't about that. It's about connections. It's about diversity. It's about all these other layers," he adds. And whenever he lost his way in the moviemaking process, he would hearken back to that—as strengthened by the fact that it isn't just his story being told in the movie. 

In making Elemental, they had put out a call to the studio for anyone who wanted to talk about their own experiences as first or second generation immigrants. "It was one of the greatest things I've done at Pixar, frankly," says producer Denise Ream in the interview. "I was struck by how many people [came]; this studio is made up of so many first and second generation immigrants."

"It was amazing to see the small groups together and their common themes that they had with their personal journeys," adds Ream. Turns out, most of these people hadn't even known about the stories of others, and a bunch of them even ended up working on the movie. "All these stories made their way into the movie in a way that I think enriches it in a really important, and not just important, but just in a way that I think we all really love."

The honesty of those stories shines through in Elemental. As Sohn dives deeper into the scene where Ember lays a shawl over her sleeping father, he states simply why it resonates: "It captured something real."

Elemental is now screening in Philippine cinemas.