Korean-American director Peter Sohn tells his personal stories through Pixar film Elemental

LOS ANGELES – Elemental, the newest animated film from Pixar and Disney, is a story about overcoming cultural differences and prejudices.

Imagining a world with four different groups of people – with bodies made of either fire, water, earth or air – it follows the blossoming, “opposites attract” friendship between a feisty Fire girl named Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) and laid-back Water guy Wade (Mamoudou Athie).

It opens in Singapore cinemas on Thursday.

The inspiration for the film was a deeply personal one for writer-director Peter Sohn, who tells The Straits Times he drew on the culture clashes his late parents experienced as Korean-American immigrants, and which he witnessed himself as someone who married outside his ethnic group.

Pixar veteran Sohn, 45, worked on the studio’s Oscar-winning Finding Nemo (2003), as well as acclaimed films such as The Incredibles (2004) and Wall-E (2008).

In a video call, he says he based Ember’s parents on his own, who emigrated from South Korea to the melting pot of New York City in the late 1960s, and opened a grocery store there despite having little money.

“My father didn’t speak English very well and he would always mess up phrases and, in the movie, you hear Ember’s dad say a line wrong and Ember try to correct it,” says Sohn, who voiced characters in the Pixar films Ratatouille (2007) and Monsters University (2013), and whose face was the inspiration for Russell, the boy in Up (2009).

Sohn also flouted the wishes of some relatives when he married a non-Korean. His wife, American animator Anna Chambers, is half Italian, and they had two children during the making of the Pixar film The Good Dinosaur (2015), which he directed.

Like Ember’s grandmother, Sohn’s Korean grandmother’s dying words to him were: “Marry Korean.”

The film-maker says: “That comes from a real place.”

Culture-clash moments from Sohn’s marriage also made their way into Elemental.

“When I took my wife’s family to have Korean food for the first time, eating something as spicy as kimchi was such a wild thing for them.

“And there’s a moment in our movie where Wade gets to try Fire food with hot coals, and he boils from the inside.”

Sohn heard similar stories from Pixar colleagues who are first- or second-generation American immigrants, and found many common threads running through them that he then incorporated into the film.

The main one was the gratitude many feel for the sacrifices their immigrant parents made coming to the United States, although there were some who experienced prejudice as well.

“The north star for this film has been that gratefulness, and understanding the sacrifices that people make leaving their homes to go to a new place,” Sohn says.

“There were stories of xenophobia and powerful moments of strength, and they all inspired the film.”

Like Sohn, many of his colleagues found love here and encountered “hilarious family situations of trying food for the first time”.

Immigration, cultural identity and xenophobia are hot-button topics in the United States, but using non-human characters to address them gave the film-makers some latitude.

“Trying to talk about any of these themes is a heavy thing that I always treat very respectfully. They’re concepts that you want to be very clear about, so there is a burden that comes with that,” Sohn says.

“But these characters aren’t human, so we have some amount of freedom to talk about this without labelling anything specifically.”

At the same time, this is not a message movie in that way, he says.

“It really comes from my personal understanding of what it means to be ‘hyphenated’, my parents’ culture, and what it meant to assimilate into another country.”

Sohn’s parents died before Elemental was completed, but he did get a chance to talk to them about it and collect some of their stories.

And, although they had initially disapproved of him becoming an animator, they eventually came around.

“I never heard it from them, but when I would go to their church, their friends would tell me, ‘Do you know how proud your parents are of you? They always talk about you.’ And I was, like, ‘Really? They never talk to me about any of this,’” he says.

“Now that they’re gone, I get very emotional thinking about that.”