May 16th, 2023 
Jackson Murphy 
Today Disney/Pixar announces that tickets are now on sale for their next feature Elemental, which opens in exactly one month, on June 16th. It’s directed by Pete Sohn (The Good Dinosaur) and focuses on water boy Wade and fire girl Ember. Are they truly meant to be together? When I visited Pixar Animation Studios for the first time in March, I had the chance to screen select footage from the film, watch a special presentation and speak with several of the film’s talented makers. (These interviews were edited for length and clarity.)
Let’s begin with my chat with Production Designer Don Shank, a two-time Emmy winner (for The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack) who actually started his career at Pixar and met his wife in the same week.
Jackson Murphy: Tell me about the matching between the elements and certain items.
Don Shank: We really wanted, and [Pete] would always talk about, immaculate realities. For me, it was about making it feel like each element had their own culture and history that they were bringing to the world — and also making it sort of modern. That was the high level target we were after. And at some point you say you want to make sure you do something that feels fun and entertaining. It really boiled down to packing as many fun elemental transformations as we could. Air people weren’t as easy as others — fire and water have a certain movement. Air is clear. It was really tough to show movement, so we relied a lot on things that were themed with air, like propellers. As far as the matching goes, it was like diving into the deep end.
JM: I was not very strong with science in school. Were you?
DS: No. But I felt very interested in it. In an alternate universe, there’s a version of me that’s doing scientific illustrations because I love diagrams. As cartoony and silly as I am, I also love science. But I never was a really great student of it.
JM: Did you look at fire and water differently now than you had before?
DS: Oh yeah. For sure. As an artist, especially here, you do research. I worked on “Luca” most recently before this. And with “Elemental”… water is refractive and it’s like a lens, so it’s inverting everything behind it. You can see everything through Wade and it became super noisy. How do we make it controlled to tell a story? We want to be able to see the character and we don’t want people… to be distracted. Same thing for Ember. I’m taking pictures of fire over my barbecue and realizing how translucent it is. That was one reason why we leaned into the cartooniness — not just for the appeal, but also because we couldn’t go 100% realistic because we needed that control.
Jackson Murphy with Don Shank
JM: And I love the crazy scene with the customers at the store.
DS: We had so much fun with the items. I always like this idea of taking a thing you’re familiar with and transforming it and translating it and making a joke out of it. And then trying to populate a whole store — everything from a comic book to a hardware section to candies. It’s more than just tourist tchotchkes — it’s more like a bodega.
JM: When was the moment when this story and this movie moved you as you were working on it?
DS: There’s two moments — a personal moment for me as a cartoonist, when I first started working on it and realized, “This is my bread and butter. This is my interest.” It’s doing these really fun, silly transformations of things — the world and the characters. I immediately took to it and wanted to be a part of it. But the bigger thing, emotionally, was when it dawned on me what the true story of the movie is… the part about the parents and what parents give to you to support your world and your life. That really connected with me. My parents were always very supportive of me as a cartoonist, even when they thought there was no money or career to be made in it. My mother was super supportive and found there was an animation school, CalArts, where I went. That really solidified my career in animation. I met Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton at school and some of the other people here. And I lost my father a year ago, so I really feel like this is something I find I’m emotionally connected to, to sort of honor everything that my parents did for me. Anyways, now you’re getting me all… (laughs)
Jackson and Sanjay Bakshi
Next, here’s part of my conversation with Visual Effects Supervisor Sanjay Bakshi, who told me usually goes to a theater and pays a ticket to see the latest Pixar movie he works on with an audience.
JM: Every three weeks you [were coming-up with] a new version of Ember and Wade. Lots of pressure?
Sanjay Bakshi: Yeah. The interesting thing about that was it was like a tool to focus the team and all of us on not getting caught up in the details. We didn’t know what Ember was gonna look like. Pete used a lot of words, but none of us had the idea of what it would be. We really needed to see it. It was a self-imposed thing, and a tool to focus the team on, “What did we learn last time? It was too stylized. We didn’t like how active the flames were. So on this one, let’s really address those issues and see if that’s something we can all get behind.” The only way to make progress is to see something and react to it. How quickly can we do that? It was a way to focus on what we were trying to learn in these three weeks and let’s only work on that so we can make progress. It was self-imposed and a tool — there’s no other way to do it, at least that I know. Words aren’t helpful, diagrams / sketches aren’t. You just have to build it and look at it.
JM: And the flames have to keep moving, which is something new for the studio.
SB: Definitely new for the studio. It was really important to Pete that… he wanted it to be a real simulation, not procedural. “I don’t want to see patterns in the motion of the fire. That’s not how fire works.” If you take photographs or video of fire and pause and then pause and then pause, it will be organized completely differently. There’s no two frames of video of fire that will look identical. And that’s true of Ember too. That’s a real simulation that’s happening.
JM: And it looks like there’s visual inspiration from New York City and San Francisco:
SB: Pete was pretty clear that he didn’t want [Element City] to be New York… but the feeling of different neighborhoods or boroughs and the different waves of immigrants.
JM: How did you want to balance grounded / realistic and cartoony moments?
SB: I think the trick for us on the technical team was to really make sure that the effects didn’t distract from the performance. We have such great animators here who really sink their teeth into those emotional moments and love doing them too. There’s so much nuance and subtlety in the performance. And sometimes in our more emotional moments in “Elemental”, there’s not a lot of dialogue either, so it’s all gotta be in the face and the expressions. I know the animators are gonna bring it, but the visual effects of the fire and water can’t… you can’t be thinking about that when you’re in one of those emotional moments. That was really the focus for us: build Ember so she feels like fire but when you need the audience to concentrate on the subtlety of the acting, that is going to come through.
JM: When was the moment when this story and this movie moved you as you were working on it?
SB: There’s been a few. Most recently hearing the score against the imagery we’ve seen hundreds of times. I was able to watch [a scene] a little bit fresh because the music was different. It was an emotional moment in the film. For a second I’m like, “I’m not working on this. I’m just experiencing it and getting what the intention of it was.” It’s really rewarding when you can see it fresh again.
Jackson (in Center) with Gwen Enderoglu and Allison Rutland
And finally, I spoke with Directing Animators Gwen Enderoglu and Allison Rutland.
JM: How did you connect to our two central characters? Was there a moment when you fully realized, “I think I know these two” or “I want to know these two”?
Allison Rutland: With Ember, I connected with her pretty early on. There was something really fascinating about her character. And I think the way she holds stuff in and sometimes explodes… I think I’m similar to that. (laughs) Her appeal and design I connected with pretty early.
Gwen Enderoglu: And thinking back to Pete’s initial pitch to the studio. He set it up as, “I want to tell a story about immigration and immigrants and also about opposites attracting.” It immediately connected me to my life. I married a Turkish man. He’s a first generation immigrant. I think there’s so many ways that we, as artists, could see ourselves in this story. It lines you up to root for these characters right off the bat.
JM: There had to be logic when it came to approaching these characters… but at the same time it’s animation, which is free-flowing. How did you feel that out?
AR: I think it was a bit of a balance, and it took time to find. It was hard to find one reference style that we were going for, so we were looking at a lot of different references. We needed the acting to come through and get that really fun elemental-ness. There was always that discussion about: if the shot was a little too human, we had to add it in. And sometimes if it was a little too ‘elemental’, it was missing the acting and we had to add the acting in. It was balancing those two pieces.
GE: I think back to our work on “Inside Out” and how we can have a whole range. You can have some bigger, cartoony, exaggerated moments. And then you can have some beautiful, sweet, sincere moments. And both can coexist in the same film. This film gave us the opportunity to play with that duality again.
JM: Can you / could you take yourself back to science class when you were younger and say, “Look at what we’re doing with fire and water now?!”
AR: It’s pretty cool. Yeah. (laughs)
JM: You mentioned “Inside Out”. We’re getting these new worlds and new universes and original stories and places. How did you sort of [embrace] that from a story and character development point?
GE: On the performance side in character development, so much really clicks into place when the voice actors are attached. When we go from scratch actors to hearing the voices of these characters, there’s a lot that unlocks for us in the personality. Some of those nuances and textures. When we heard Mamadou [Athie]’s crying for the first time we were like, “There’s Wade!” We knew it was him. So much is revealed about the characters through that.
JM: And I love the romance that we see in Ember and Wade.
GE: The connection that’s at the heart of our film is what it’s all about. There’s aspects of our lives that we can weave into that. There’s little pieces of ourselves as actors and performers. There’s also the beautiful father-daughter storyline that many women in the department could connect with. There’s so many layers to it.
JM: When did working on this movie become a really outstanding experience for you that sets itself apart from all the other movies you’ve been a part of — at this studio and at different places?
AR: I guess right from the start it felt pretty different in terms of how fluid the whole thing was. There was a lot of fluidity at the beginning with exploration and Pete’s openness to go to 11 with everything — push it as far as we can and we’ll come back later. That was new for me. It was fun and challenging at the same time. And sometimes in dailies, when Pete was kicking off a sequence, he would tell us the personal story behind it, and it was really meaningful and super sincere. That was awesome.
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