'Elemental' director shares touching moment with his Korean immigrant parents that inspired Pixar's latest adventure

Pixar has triumphantly anthropomorphized everything from toys to bugs, vehicles to fish, emotions to souls; now, for the revered animation studio’s latest trick, comes a feature film bringing to life nature’s classical four elements: fire, earth, air, and water.

Yet, with Elemental, director Peter Sohn tells one of Pixar’s most deeply human — and most historically American — tales.

The story of Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis), the first-generation daughter of a shop-owning “Firish” family in the sprawling metropolis of Element City, is a clear metaphor for the immigrant experience in America. Arriving in Element with little money, Ember’s parents, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi), are snubbed at every turn while trying to find a place to live before ultimately settling in a predominantly Firish area of the city (not unlike the segregated Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Italys et al. established across major U.S. cities) and opening a successful convenience store that they hope Ember will someday take over.

Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment at Pixar’s offices in Emeryville, Calif., Sohn — the studio vet who worked on Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Ratatouille before making his directorial debut with 2015’s The Good Dinosaur, explained how his own Korean immigrant parents inspired the story behind Elemental.

After making The Good Dinosaur, the filmmaker was asked to speak at event in the Bronx, where he was born and raised. “I invited my parents to it and got up on stage and [gave this speech], and seeing my father, my mother, my brother there, and I could see the city miles of how hard their life was,” says Sohn, whose Pixar cred extends well beyond his work as an animator and director (Russell, the boy in Up, was based on Sohn’s physical appearance, and he has also voiced a handful of roles, including the fan-favorite robot cat SOX in last year’s Lightyear).

“And I got very emotional and I just saw them and just thanked them. ‘If it wasn't for all the hard work, all that you guys sacrificed, I would not be here.’ I don't remember everything I said 'cause I was so emotional that day. But after I got back to the studio after this event, people were like, ‘How was this New York thing?’ And I told them that story and they were like, ‘Peter, that's your next movie.’ And that was the start of all of this, it became [about] trying to understand our parents as people and the people around us that have sacrificed for us.”

But the metaphor extends beyond Sohn’s Korean heritage. “The idea was never to appropriate one single ethnicity for each of our elements,” explains producer Denise Ream.

Says Lewis: “Obviously you see that fire people represent the immigrant community, but even though Pete is Asian himself, I think it's any kind of community that has had to come to the big city or a new place and kind of end up creating their own community. You see how different Element City looks from Fire Town. Fire Town kind of has its own vibe going on and then you see that fire people stick with fire people and then everyone in Element City kind of hangs out freely. And I think that mirrors a lot of things in real life as well when immigrants come over here and are looking for that sense of community and quite literally have to create it themselves at all costs.”

The expectation that Ember will stick with fire people is tested when she begins developing feelings for Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a highly sensitive water element working as a city inspector and who helps save her family’s shop from flooding. The Lumens may be immigrants, but it’s Ember’s father, Bernie, who carries prejudice when it comes to their budding romance. Fire and water, he tells her, simply don’t mix.

Elemental, then, is basically Pixar’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

“That’s fair to say,” says Sohn. Ream, meanwhile, cited other culture-clash films — like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Moonstruck — as influences. “It always started with that sort of opposites [attract] sort of thing. But at the same time, it kept wanting to be more. Like all of a sudden it became a family drama, and then it became this city thing, and it kept growing.

“But at the heart of it was always this idea of what would happen if fire and water could connect.”

Elemental opens Friday, June 16.

Watch the trailer: