Elemental director Peter Sohn on drawing inspiration from real-life stories of love and sacrifice

Q32:36Peter Sohn on his stunning new Pixar movie Elemental

When most of us look at the periodic table of elements, we see a bunch of indecipherable symbols to be memorized.

That was not the case for animator and voice actor, Peter Sohn.

Growing up, Sohn was always an artistic kid. And when he saw the periodic table, he saw an apartment building where all the different elements lived together as neighbours.

Now, 30 years later, Sohn has brought his vision to life in the new Disney and Pixar animated film, Elemental. It's set in a city populated by four different groups: water, fire, air and earth.

In an interview with Q's Tom Power, Sohn explained how he decided on the film's central tension: a brooding romance between Ember, a fire woman and Wade, a water man.

"When I was free doodling, this fire character came up and I drew it over water and was like, 'Oh, that seems dangerous,'" he recalled. "Then I drew a water character and there was tension between them that triggered a personal connection to me of: I married someone that wasn't Korean, but I grew up with a family that was like, 'You got to marry Korean!"

Even on her deathbed, Sohn's grandmother reminded him to marry within his community, which wasn't funny at the time, but seems "crazy" looking back, he said.

Along with his own experiences, Sohn drew from the experiences of roughly 100 of his Pixar colleagues, who are first and second-generation immigrants from all over the world. He asked them to share their personal stories of love, loss and sacrifice.

"There's this young woman named Charul who's a writer at Pixar," he told Power. "She is Indian and was in love with a German guy. And, you know, she told us the story of having to go to an astrologist in India … to see if they were a match or not. I was like, 'Right, yeah, matchmaking.'"

"They were such a good match it, sort of, like, transcended culture and love won out. And that was an inspiration for Ember's mother, Cinder, to be this spiritual matchmaker, who smells other fire characters' smoke and go, 'Oh, I smell a little love.' It was all inspired by the stories that we heard."

WATCH | Official trailer for Elemental:

Bringing aspects from Sohn's life to the big screen

Elemental is not only a love story, but one of immigration and struggle.

It follows a young fire couple, Burny and Cinder, who are pregnant with their first child, as they make their way to a land that is primarily water. They start their own shop called The Fireplace, which somewhat mirrors Sohn's life as a son of Korean immigrants who ran a grocery store in the Bronx.

"My father came in the late '60s to New York," said Sohn. "He started with $150 and $75 went to a rental. It was like this prostitute's apartment and he would just say, "Hooker house, hooker house.' I'm like, 'Wow, OK.' And the other $75 went to a pretzel hotdog cart that he rented from some place. From there, he was saving money until he could get a grocery store. By the time he saved enough, he had met my mom. Five weeks later, they got married and then nine months later, I was born. I was a honeymoon baby!"

"So, you know, I grew up in this store till I was about eight or nine, selling stuff, playing GI Joe on Campbell's soup cans, changing my brother's diaper on cabbage boxes and things like that. I don't know if I'm romanticizing it now just talking to you, Tom, but that was the life, that was the life for sure."

Elemental hits theaters on Friday, June 16.

The full interview with Peter Sohn is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Written by Trishla Parekh. Interview with Peter Sohn produced by Jennifer Warren.