Pixar offers a love letter to the beauty and sacrifices of immigrant families.

BY BERNARD BOO

EMBER AND WADE, the odd couple at the center of Pixar’s Elemental, are visual effects confections unlike any other. Their bodies, made of pure fire and water, respectively, are in perpetual flux, which pushed the studio’s artists and technicians beyond their limits. Element City, the backdrop for the couple’s meet-cute, is an imaginative tapestry of intricate components that took thousands of hours of designing and tweaking to bring to the screen.

But all that VFX wizardry means nothing if it’s not serving a story that has something to say—and director Peter Sohn, a second-generation

Korean immigrant, had so much to say that the film’s development took an unexpectedly dark turn early on.

In the early stages of production, Sohn lost his father, one of the story’s main inspirations. “I wanted to capture [my parents’ experience of coming to the States] in the film, but I did it in a very dark way when my dad died,” Sohn tells Den of Geek. “I went off the rails. I [presented] a set of reels that were really dark, and no one on the team was connecting with it. That was a dark place for me.”

Tragically, Sohn lost his mother near the end of production, too. It shook him to his core. But by that time, the