How ‘Elemental’ Breathed Life Into Fire, Water, Earth and Air

The film’s director and production designer encountered challenges and took a few wrong turns as they worked on anthropomorphizing the natural world.

A woman made of fire falls for a man made of water.

The filmmakers behind the new Disney/Pixar movie “Elemental” knew the story they wanted to tell. They just weren’t sure how the idea was going to work — or look. They encountered plenty of challenges and took a few wrong turns as they worked on this romance-adventure that anthropomorphizes earth, air, fire and water.

The film’s director, Peter Sohn, said during an interview in New York that he remembered that when he was a boy, the chart of elements in science class reminded him of apartments. “Like these families of copper living next to helium, but don’t trust them because they’re gassy,” he said.

But how do you get from the periodic table to the dinner table? Sohn took that early idea and applied it to the four elements of the natural world, merging the concept with an immigrant story inspired by his parents (they’re the basis for the fire family at the center of the film). Below is a closer look at what went into developing the visual style for each element.

The final look of the film’s protagonist, Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis), was a far cry from Sohn’s early sketches. “I started with a little campfire and it had eyes and it was really amorphous, like going through door jambs and keyholes” he said. “It was just about this kinetic movement initially.”

But that needed to translate into a persona that audiences could connect with. Sohn said that when he added arms and legs, it was hard to tell the character’s age: “It almost looked like a toddler.” Extending the arms and legs helped, though the character’s sex couldn’t be distinguished. “But once you put hips, then it was like, oh, this feels more female.”

As they worked out the character design, Sohn said, the animators were also trying to nail down how a fire person would function technically. Initial computer simulations of Ember’s constantly-burning head looked more like a flame gone awry.

“The fire was so realistic, they put eyes on her and she was terrifying,” Sohn said. They had to figure out a way to control the fire and lean toward something more caricatured so her features would stand out. They did so using a technique in which they drew a shape, and software would repeat that pattern in a 3-D simulation.

Water

If Sohn thought fire was a challenge, a water character was going to be that much more so. “I joked that ‘Inside Out’ had it easy,” Sohn said. “No one knows what an emotion looks like. They could just do whatever.”

With Wade, Ember’s love interest, the techniques they tried would sometimes take things too far. Too many bubbles or manipulations turned him into “Jell-O man, not water man,” Sohn said.

Once they got the right balance to simulate water, there was the matter of how to light Wade (voiced by Mamoudou Athie). “Water in a basement needs light to look like water,” Sohn said. “But when there’s no light, there’s nothing there. And so Wade would disappear in the computer.” And when the character was on the roof with Ember in daylight, “he would get overexposed and just go hot white.”

Designing the living environment of the water characters was a little easier, the production designer Don Shank said in a video call. For the high-end apartment of Wade’s mother, Brook, “even though it’s supposed to be elegant, we asked, how playful can we make it?” So they turned the floors of the apartment into a giant family pool, complete with toys. To move through it, Ember has to stand on an inflatable chair.

Air

While the air element isn’t as prominent in the film, the animators wrestled with the question of how to give something we generally can’t see at all a sense of character, especially when it came to Gale, a city worker and sports fan voiced by Wendi McLendon-Covey.

Sohn borrowed an idea from his 2009 short “Partly Cloudy,” which included clouds as characters, to personify air that way. But he said that one artist, Ravindra Dwivedi, “brought this idea of a simulated wisp on top of it that started giving us more of a windy quality.”

Earth

The film illustrates earth through woody, leafy figures, mildly racy jokes about pruning and an adolescent named Clod who’s trying to woo Ember by letting her know he’s starting to develop (shown by one little flower growing under his arm). In Element City, Shank said, the designers focused on which parts of the infrastructure made sense for earth designs.

“We thought, who would be most interested in bridges? Water people don’t need bridges,” Shank said. “So we leaned into earth being in charge of them. That’s why our bridges look more like trees.”