Elemental is the latest film from Pixar Animation Studios, and it transports moviegoers to Element City, a place where a host of elements live and work. The movie follows Ember (Leah Lews), a short-tempered fire-person whose parents left their fire-based home in search of a new life before she was born. The film emulates what life is like for immigrants in a new city, and the movie does a unique job of creating an entire way of life for each element. The fire language used in the film is especially interesting, so ComicBook.com asked director Peter Sohn and producer Denise Ream about the creation of the language.
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“Yeah, there is,” Sohn said when asked if there’s a guide to the fire language. “In the Art Of book, they have a little breakdown of the language, but it really started off in a silly way. I remember pitching to the gang about if the parents were fighting next door, it should sound like a fireplace, like a roaring fireplace, like the pops and crackles of that. And then we actually tried sound effects over the language, and it didn’t work. But then David Peterson and the language team took just the vocal things that we can do that sounded like fire, and then built the language from there.”
Ream added, “Originally, we were going to have a little bit more of the Firish in the movie. And then as things happen, it just was not as big of a part as originally we thought. But yeah, we have a whole alphabet and everything. One of my favorite anecdotes is I went to UC Berkeley, so we have ‘Go Bears’ in Firish.”
The Unsung Heroes of Elemental‘s Production:
We spoke with Sohn and Ream and asked them if they wanted to shout out anyone from the production.
“I think Steve Schaffer, our editor and their team, Ben Morris and Claire,” Sohn shared. “That edit team,” Ream chimed in. Sohn explained, “Look, this took seven years, and that team has been holding the fort for that long cutting. And the way these things get made are, it’s very, very violent. You’re building something, you’re destroying it, setting it on fire, then rebuilding it again. And that team did it all throughout with us the whole time. My heart, forever grateful.”
Ream added, “I’m going to throw out our sets department, too. They had a big hill to climb … And so big heart, big love to our sets team.”
When we asked the film’s stars, Mamoudou Athie (Wade) and Leah Lewis (Ember), the same question about unsung heroes, they sweetly called out Ream.
“There’s so many people: all the animators, the executives, the producers. We’ve spoken about Denise Ream ad nauseam, but she’s a remarkable person. The tenderness, just the lead in the way that she does. Denise Ream is a national treasure. I love her so much,” Athie shared. “National treasure, that’s a good word for it,” Lewis added.
“The animators as well, the writers, everybody involved. It’s hard to, because we haven’t met every single one of them, so you can’t listen by name, but you see the movie. You see it’s another level of technology and then creativity that’s… Go on,” Athie added.
Leah explained. “No, but he’s telling it all, because I think what a lot of people don’t realize is how many people go into making a film like this. Mamoudou and I took a trip to Pixar a couple weeks ago. Could have been two months ago, don’t remember. We actually got to meet some of the animators and see the different people that were assigned different scenes of the movie. It wasn’t even like, okay, one person was doing this part of the movie. It was like, no, this was my scene. This was my part. He showed us a little video of Wade and they had this avatar on the side, and he would click the mouse and make the hand move. Then we’d see Wade’s hand move. I was just like, what is that? There was just so much that I think even him and I are still learning.”
Athie concluded, “I don’t get it. It’s beyond my capacity … It’s incredible. I don’t understand how they do it.”
Elemental is now playing in theaters.
