Pixar’s next stop: Element City. The Toy Story and Inside Out studio has fired up a new poster for Elemental, its original feature film set in a city where fire, water, land, and air residents live together. In the new movie from The Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn, opposites react when the tough, quick-witted, and fiery young woman Ember Lumen (Nancy Drew‘s Leah Lewis) makes friends with the fun, sappy, go-with-the-flow water guy Wade Ripple (The Get Down‘s Mamoudou Athie), who challenges her beliefs about the world in which they live.
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The poster, below, transports moviegoers to Element City — like Disney’s Zootopia but for the natural elements. When Ember leaves her comfort zone in her native Firetown, she ventures out into what Disney/Pixar describes as a living city “inspired by big cities around theglobe and embraces theorized contributions from each elementalcommunity — from giant pine-tree-like buildings and waterfall skyscrapersto a tornado-shaped arena called Cyclone Stadium.”
Elemental also features the voices of Ronnie del Carmen (Inside Out) as Ember’s soon-to-be-retired dad, Bernie; Shila Ommi (Tehran) as Ember’s love-seeking mom, Cinder; Wendi McLendon-Covey (The Goldbergs) as Wade’s stormy and Air-Ball-loving boss, Gale; Catherine O’Hara (Schitt’s Creek) as Wade’s welcoming mom, Brook; Mason Wertheimer as Ember’s admiring earth neighbor, Clod; and Joe Pera (Joe Pera Talks With You) as an overgrown city bureaucrat, Fern.
“My parents emigrated from Korea in the early 1970s and built a bustling grocery store in the Bronx,” Sohn, who directed the 2009 Pixar short Partly Cloudy before making his feature directorial debut on Good Dinosaur, said in a statement announcing Elemental. “We were among many families who ventured to a new land with hopes and dreams — all of us mixing into one big salad bowl of cultures, languages, and beautiful little neighborhoods. That’s what led me to Elemental.”
Sohn continued: “Our story is based on the classic elements — fire, water, land, and air. Some elements mix with each other, and some don’t. What if these elements were alive?”
Pixar’s Elemental opens only in theaters June 16th, 2023.
