Meet Mr. Pixar

Russell, the pint-sized Wilderness Explorer who knocks on Carl Fredricksen’s door in Pixar’s Up, is an adorable, roly-poly Asian kid with an upbeat spirit and eyes full of kindness and wonder. He’s also full of questions.

“Is this how you steer your house?”

“Am I supposed to dig the hole before or after?”

“Is this step three or step five?”

Up’s director, Pete Docter, had some trouble cracking the movie’s screenplay, so he enlisted the help of Tom McCarthy, who would go on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with Spotlight. Carl originally traveled to Paradise Falls, where he met a talking dog and a giant bird, by himself; but McCarthy felt that Carl needed a human relationship to ground him a little more. He noticed a young employee who was always roaming around Pixar: a Korean American man who was once caricatured by an animator friend as a thumb wearing a baseball cap—a happy guy with eyes full of kindness and wonder.

“You’d see him, like, wandering around the whole building and talking to people and stopping in the middle of the lobby,” says Docter. “This weird guy would come over and talk to us, and Tom was like, ‘Who’s that guy?’ We’d talk about him ... and he became the general model for Russell.”

The man, whose name is Peter Sohn, had also been a Boy Scout in an urban setting—which Docter and McCarthy thought was hilarious. “He influenced the character in a lot of ways,” says Docter. “His enthusiasm, his naivete, his exuberance for everything and fearlessness, and all of that, I think, went into the character”—along with, Docter says with a laugh, “maybe some little design nods.”

They even went as far as having Sohn provide the temporary scratch dialogue for Russell, though ultimately it sounded too weird to have a grown-up voicing the little boy. But not because Sohn himself isn’t childlike. He has “this guilelessness,” says Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille. “[Russell] is continually upbeat and curious and wants to know about everything and is ready for any adventure that happens. That’s Pete. The fact that he inspired a character just by walking around Pixar ... that kind of tells you something about him.”

Sohn joined Pixar in the fall of 2000, and he has roamed through just about every department at the Emeryville, California, studio—character design, story art, animation, voice acting, writing, and producing. He directed the 2015 film The Good Dinosaur, and on the heels of that (turbulent) production, he pitched the studio his own deeply personal story, inspired by his immigrant parents and his own interracial marriage, fused with a wild Pixarian premise about a girl made of fire falling in love with a boy made of water.

Elemental, which opens Friday, took seven years to make. In that time, Sohn weathered a wild pandemic and lost both of his parents, who inspired the movie. Yet, somehow, the 45-year-old Sohn has held on to his guilelessness and optimism. At a recent sound mix for Elemental at Skywalker Ranch, Sohn showed up early, despite having just celebrated the film’s completion at a wrap party over the weekend. In a white baseball cap and a blue collegiate Pixar sweater, he talked excitedly about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the first time he met Steven Spielberg. He also seemed just a tad harried and understandably exhausted, confessing that he just needed to “stop being so fucking critical of every single frame” of his new creation.

It’s shocking to hear an f-bomb emerge from his boyish face, but you quickly realize it’s just an expression of Sohn’s boundless passion. In the mixing theater, he asks the sound wizards to pause the movie and throws out detailed questions about why some of the loudness and balances sound different in this 5.1 mix than they did in Dolby Atmos. “Thank you for stopping and starting it—I really appreciate it,” he tells them kindly. “I think it’s really just my anxiety.”

Pete Sohn—everyone calls him Pete—may not have the name recognition of Pete Docter or Brad Bird, but his fingerprints have been on an incredible number of Pixar films and iconic scenes over the past two decades. Elemental is a kind of coronation for this inquisitive explorer, one that has been fraught with emotional peril but has ultimately emerged as a cinematic expression of its creator. As Docter puts it: “The movie feels like being with Pete.”

Sohn grew up in New York in the 1980s. His father left South Korea in the late ’60s, the first in his family to immigrate to America, with only $150 in his pocket. He spent $75 on a “hooker house” in Harlem and the rest on a hot dog cart that he “rented from the Greeks” and used to sell hot dogs, pretzels, and Icees in midtown Manhattan. The elder Sohn met Hea Ja in church; they got married after five weeks, and nine months later, Pete was born. “I’m a honeymoon baby—my mom would always say that,” Sohn says. “I don’t know what the value of growing up knowing that is.”

His father saved enough money to buy a scooter and start a messenger service, then used his profits to purchase a grocery store in the North Bronx. After several years, he started a new store in New Rochelle, then another in Yonkers. At every shop, Hea Ja was the cashier. “I just remember most of the time [the hours] were like 4 in the morning till 11 o’clock at night,” Sohn says, “and how hard they worked. [It’s] a life that I’m very proud of, in terms of what they accomplished, but it was really a lot of my father’s vision—of seeing an empty store and what he could do with that and making it into something that gave us a life.”

In Elemental, the main character, Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis), grows up in an apartment above her parents’ grocery store. Her father, a short fire man with a hot temper, runs the shop and caters to other fire people who have migrated to Element City, where they jockey for space with other cultures (water, air, and earth) in a clever allegory for a melting-pot city like New York—with all of the prejudices and tensions that implies. Sohn’s dad was a short, bald guy, very much like the father character in Elemental. “This short fire dude that’s like ‘arrr’ at the shop, running the register,” says Sohn, “I think he would have really laughed at that.”

A vivid, recurring memory from Sohn’s childhood is of his father sleeping. “Having worked all day long, he would be at the register, just asleep,” he says. “And my mom would put something on him. There was such an empathy that my brother and I would have of, like, Fuck, he’s just working so hard. He never enjoyed a movie because he just fell asleep through every movie.” There’s a grace note in Sohn’s film where the fire dad, Bernie, is dozing at the register. “That moment I just love so much,” he says. “The animators captured something so simple, of a fire that’s resting, that’s sleeping, and then his daughter puts a metal shawl over the fire. Why does fire need warmth? It’s such a weird, funny thing that I let go because the feeling of it just feels so truthful for that immigrant experience.”

The film took on even more meaning after his father died, and even more when his mother passed five years later.

“I started doing research with them in the beginning, asking them about, like, ‘Why did you leave Korea? How hard was it here? What was the first person that helped you?’” says Sohn. “But I didn’t tell them that it was connected to a movie.” His dad, Yung Tahk Sohn, died during the film’s first year of development. “And then the movie would go on, where I would talk to my mom about questions, but I wasn’t saying, like, ‘Oh, it’s about fire and water,’ or, ‘It’s an animated movie.’ All she ever cared about was, you know, ‘What’s in your bank account?’ and the kids.”

Sohn’s mother, Hea Ja, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years ago during the height of the pandemic. “Because of Zoom, I got to stay with her for her last two or three months before she passed,” he says. “And that was the time when I was showing her stuff. But I don’t know if she understood what was going on. She was heavily on drugs. I tried to show her some of the reels, but she could barely make it through like a minute of anything.”

Sohn started drawing as a kid. Around age 11, he got a copy of The Illusion of Life, a 1981 book in which veteran animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston revealed the secrets behind their classic Disney animations. Soon after that, Sohn went to Blockbuster and rented Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk anime film Akira. “It was rated higher than I should have seen it at,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, there was stuff in there that was really disturbing ... like a dog being shot up in the opening of that thing. It wasn’t just how shocking it was; it was just that I was so used to, like, the fantasy worlds of the Disney films—which I adore. But I remember seeing Akira as like a cinematic punch in the face.”

That one-two punch inflamed his curiosity about the persistence of vision, character design, and the magic of animation. But he had to draw in secret, because his mother forbade it. He later learned that she, too, loved drawing as a kid—but “she wasn’t allowed to do it in Korea,” he says. “She was in a family of four sisters, the youngest being the son. The son got everything because they were so poor, and so she didn’t get that education that she wanted. She had a lot of resentment toward it, and it triggered a lot of stuff for her.” His mother would find hidden drawings in his notebooks and tear them up. She believed that fighting her kids would make them stronger, and animation became Sohn’s mode of rebellion. His father, too, wanted Sohn to aim toward a more solid career. “I now understand where they were at,” Sohn says. “But at that time, I was just like, ‘Fuck you! No!’”

The funny thing is, animation was also how he bonded with his mom. Her English remained limited, a source of embarrassment for her, but she loved taking Pete and his little brother, Phillip, to the movies. “My brother and I were cultural brokers—we would just translate everything for her,” Sohn says. “Doctor visits or if you were at a touristy place or restaurants. But the movies, because she loved them so much, there was this very desperate want from her to be like, ‘Wait, what? 그녀는 뭐라고 했어?’ Like, What did she say? Or, What did he say?” Sohn’s Korean was terrible, he says, so translating wasn’t easy, but when they watched Disney animated movies, language wasn’t necessary. “I just remember seeing Dumbo at the Eastchester Library, a feeling of not having to explain anything to her. I didn’t understand the impact of it, but I definitely remember not having to translate anything ... and her getting emotional. We would just go to the movies all the time. My dad would be asleep in every theater we would ever take him to. My mom was just wide-eyed.”

When Sohn was in middle school, his father, tired of the grocery grind, purchased an art supply store in New Rochelle. One day, an animator working on the ABC show The Real Ghostbusters came in for supplies, and with his typical bluntness, Sohn’s father asked him: “How much money do you make? What’s your salary? How much do you make an hour?” Sohn laughs at the memory. “The guy told him, and ... once my dad knew that you could make money off of it, he turned on a dime, literally. My mom was still in opposition, but yeah—if it wasn’t for my father, I don’t think I would be doing this.”

Pixar

Sohn was accepted at the premier school for animators, the California Institute of the Arts, in 1995. While there, his class was invited up to a janky theater in Valencia to preview a new, unreleased movie made by some alumni. Sohn remembers seeing a young John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Andrew Stanton, who were all “so proud of” their computer-animated feature: Toy Story. “All of us that studied our whole high school, childhood lives to get into 2D were like: What is this?” says Sohn, who distinguished himself at CalArts as a hand-drawn animator and an exceptional draftsman. “The dream was to be Frank and Ollie, to, like, die animating in 2D. Master it, be a cleanup artist, rough in-betweener, then start doing keys, then become a lead animator, and then die. That was the dream—I swear to you. The passion was so real.”

That passion led him and a handful of his classmates to reach out to Brad Bird and Tony Fucile, who were beginning work on a new feature for Warner Bros. called The Iron Giant. The CalArts kids wanted to pick their brains about the business. “We both had done that sort of thing with the Disney masters,” says Bird. So he agreed to have lunch with Sohn and his peers and answer their “million questions.” But Bird went even further: That summer, he hired those four students as animator’s assistants on The Iron Giant—and even gave them their own scenes to animate. “Every once in a while, someone will disappoint you,” says Bird, “but for the most part, people rise to the occasion. I just treated people like I wanted to be treated when I first started working.”

It was a profound experience for Sohn: “Brad was so passionate about animation and filmmaking and his attitude of ‘An idea can come from anywhere.’ You really felt like, Oh, we’re new on the show. We’re just rough in-betweeners. We don’t know shit. And yet if anyone had a good idea, his goal was just to make the film as best as it could be.”

“The film tanked,” Sohn adds. “It did so terribly. But I have so much pride for just working with that team and just trying to make something the best as you could. At Pixar, it was never about titles. I don’t care about it. It was just about how best could I help the movie.”

Bird was recruited by Pixar in 2000 to begin working on The Incredibles (“Steve Jobs said, ‘You know, we’ve done three films here now—we’re slipping into habits,’” says Docter with a laugh), and he brought about 15 new animators with him, including Sohn. “He’s a multi-talent,” says Bird. “That’s one of the reasons that I was always interested in whatever he was doing. He is kind of insatiable. He wants to know about every part of the process, and he wants to be able to understand every part of the process and even do every part of the process, because it allows him to understand the beast.”

Before The Incredibles went into production, Sohn was asked to design the fish tank and dentist’s office in Finding Nemo. “You’re just like: OK, how do you make this fun?” Sohn says. Stanton, the film’s director, said, “‘Hey, these look like storyboards. Have you done storyboards before?’ I was like, ‘Nope.’ He goes, ‘Do you want to join into story?’ I’m like, ‘I have no idea what that is. I would be terrified of it.’ And he goes, ‘Just come along.’” Sohn claims he “failed miserably” in his first foray into the story department—but he kept impressing his supervisors, and he also proactively took classes at Pixar University, trying his hand at each part of the beast.

He animated one of Bird’s favorite moments in The Incredibles, when Bob refuses to let his super-wife, Helen, join him in a dangerous, climactic fight because, Bob says, “I can’t lose you again. ... I’m not strong enough,” before she plants a big kiss on him. “Those kinds of scenes are really easy to do badly,” says Bird, “because they can easily come off as artificial. And Pete did this wonderful kiss. There were technical limitations to the models that we were using. ... Humans were a weak part of character CG animation. There weren’t too many successfully done humans—they were kind of ugly looking and awkward and all of that. We had to kind of push hard to get them to feel really physical. That was a very delicate scene, and Pete did a fantastic job on it.”

Sohn also voiced a character with a tiny role in The Incredibles—“Brad was just like, ‘Hey, you’re from New York—can you act like a mugger?’”—then provided scratch dialogue for Remy’s brother, Emile, in Ratatouille. When Bird took over that film, he realized Sohn was actually a great choice—but needed some direction. “I felt like the character was not conceived correctly,” Bird says, “and that if you had him being less picky about his food but kind of this jovial, supportive guy, then his attitude is going to be kind of slower and lazier. Pete was very hyped up initially. The first time that I recorded him for my version of the film, I had him drink a couple of beers—and I drank them with him, you know; I had a couple of beers too—and then I said, ‘OK, now do the lines.’ And so he did it, but he did it in a more relaxed way.”

Sohn also storyboarded the iconic sequence in Up where Carl’s house unleashes a million balloons and lifts off the ground. Docter had pitched Sohn the sequence, “and he got, on his own, some music and came back,” Docter says. “I swear, that was the first thing boarded, and it’s almost shot for shot what he drew.”

“If I’m being genuine, I’m just so grateful that I get to work with that guy,” says Docter. “He is insanely talented. He can do everything. Kind of makes me sick, because he’s a great voice actor, he’s a great designer, he can animate. I mean, he’s one of our top animators. ... And to top it all off, he’s a guy who makes it fun. There are a lot of people who are super talented, but it’s like a tax working with them because of their personality or whatever. Pete is just out to make people laugh and to find the joy in the situations.”

By 2009, Docter and his fellow higher-ups at Pixar knew Sohn had the makings of a great director—his affability, his ease of collaboration with both the creative team and studio bosses, his learned knowledge of every role. Docter says animating and directing are often diametrically opposed, because animators are prone to treat other animators as “extensions of their own arm.” But, he says, “If you can communicate emotionally—which is of course what Pete does so well—what you’re looking for in the scene and describe enough of the parameters, you give the animator a nice comfortable box to work in but let them pour in whatever they’re going to bring instead of you filling it and giving it to them. Pete’s really great at that.”

His baptism was as fiery as they come. Sohn was hired to codirect The Good Dinosaur with his mentor, Bob Peterson, and the film was unveiled with terrific fanfare at the D23 Expo in 2013 with a cast headed by John Lithgow, Frances McDormand, and Bill Hader. But it ran into intractable story problems—the plot originally cast the dinosaurs as Amish-like farmers, and the lead dino bonded with an adult man. Peterson was removed from the picture, and Sohn was tasked with a complete overhaul: rewriting, recasting, and remaking the whole film in 18 months—less than half the time it usually takes to make a Pixar movie.

“I was very vulnerable,” Sohn says. “I just wanted to keep the whole team [apprised of] what was going on as transparent as I could be. I didn’t know if I should do that, but it was just like: ‘Look, this film is sick. It’s dying. We need to do our best to try to keep it alive and bring it up. And I’m terrified—I’ve never done this before, everyone. But I love what Bob’s intent of this was, and let’s try to honor it as best as we can.’”

Everyone rallied around Sohn, who proved his mettle by being vulnerable, asking for help, and making decisions from his gut. “He was very open and I would say disarmingly honest,” says Denise Ream, who produced The Good Dinosaur. “He was frank that he needed help. He told me what he needed and asked for what he needed, and that just made my job so much easier—and the crew’s job, frankly. ... He just never hid his feelings from me, and he endeared himself to me. We had a lot of fun, even under such stressful circumstances. And we really built a great team.”

Sohn saw the final story—about a young dinosaur named Spot who lost his father and then adopted a human boy in the wild—as weirdly mirroring his experience on the film: “I had lost a father figure in my director that I was working with ... and then I was thrown into the jungle of directing for the first time, not knowing what I was doing, and so much of it was about survival.”

“There’s still some PTSD from it,” he admits, but the experience bonded him with Ream and other key collaborators who became willing to march with him anywhere. “The reaction from the audience wasn’t the greatest, but I still was filled with pride, just of the journey,” Sohn says. “That idea of creatively working with a team in that open way was a big thing that helped me this time.”

Pixar

While he was promoting The Good Dinosaur, which opened with a whimper in November 2015, Sohn was interviewed by Terry Gross for NPR’s Fresh Air. After he mentioned that he was born in the Bronx, he received a call from a local government official asking him to come back for a hometown celebration. “I was like, ‘Ehh, I don’t know—I’m not really from the Bronx. I was there till I was 10.’ She said, ‘You were born there. You’re a son of the Bronx. You’re doing this.’ I’m like, ‘That is the most New York thing I’ve ever heard.’”

So Sohn went to the Bronx, and he brought his parents along. “We’re all in our church suits, and, like, my parents had never done anything like that. Neither had I. And I had a speech [prepared] about how New York has nothing to do with Pixar,” Sohn says with a laugh. “I got up on stage and looked at this crowd. I just remember all these diverse, different faces—from the West Indians, Jamaicans, and then these four yellow faces of my parents and my brother and his wife. And I got very emotional. I could feel it welling up.”

In Elemental, Ember’s unlikely romantic interest is Wade, a sensitive water guy who drips, pours, and geysers tears in response to the slightest emotions. He’s sweet, open, and utterly sincere. “I’m like, ‘Oh, wait. Is Pete Ember? Yeah, he is. Oh no, he’s also Wade,’” Docter says. “He’s so gregarious, no filter, and he’ll just tell you how he feels right now and how you make him feel. And then he also has aspects of Ember, in terms of the cultural lineage and the pressure that has been applied there. I mean, almost every character he kind of shows up in. He’s a very loving dad, so you see that in him. He has a sort of impish side, like [the] mom does in the film.”

That day in the Bronx, Sohn was able to look right at his parents and thank them. “Reliving it, I’m just so fucking grateful I got to do it before they died,” he says, “because I didn’t know they were going to die. I had no idea.” He went back to Pixar, and, in the midst of pitching ideas for a new feature film, he mentioned this experience. “And they’re like, ‘Peter, that’s the film.’”

Sohn and Ream interviewed many other first- and second-generation artists at the studio in order to tell a story that rang true to the shared immigrant experience, then built out a fantastical world and romantic comedy plot from the humor of the four classical elements going about their humanized lives in the same city. “These story rooms are just like therapy sessions sometimes,” says Sohn, who also coded a lot of his own experience with his wife into the film’s inter-elemental romance.

Sohn met Anna Chambers, a white woman from Southern California, at CalArts. After school, they both moved to the Bay Area and worked at an internet company creating e-cards. Somewhere around the time, he asked her out. They’ve been together ever since. He was frankly terrified to bring her home—his parents were pretty chilly, and his grandmother’s dying wish for all of her grandsons was literally “Marry Korean!” (a gag that made it into Elemental).

“My dad would say weird stuff, and my mom just did not talk to her,” says Sohn. “Once we got married, my dad turned immediately—my dad was very loving and gracious. My mom was still cold. I had a big fight with her about, like, ‘Why do you not talk to her? Why are you so cold to her?’ And she said, ‘This is my fear, is that I can’t share anything with her. I cannot share the language. I cannot share the food. Because she doesn’t know any of it.’”

The central conflict in Elemental stems from Ember’s father’s disdain for those outside his native culture, an instinct created in response to the way the other elements have marginalized his people. Ember and Wade’s chances at romance are further complicated by the fact that fire and water really are chemically designed to destroy each other. In real life, Sohn’s mother started to thaw once he and Chambers had children—Vivian is now 13, and Sam is 10. “But yeah, it was tough,” Sohn admits.

Since this is a Pixar film, prejudices are of course exposed and corrected, and differences are overcome. The story is ultimately a celebration of not just compatibility between two races or cultures, but also the astounding chemical reaction that occurs when different elements mingle. The rejoinder to his mother’s early fears is as beautiful—and romantic—as an animator could imagine.

At Elemental’s Los Angeles premiere last week, Sohn still looked a little dazed. He seemed surprised when I told him the movie made me cry, and he said he was still feeling really critical about what he’d made.

Whatever else it is—a parable about immigration, a technical effects achievement, a weathered survivor of the pandemic—Elemental is a naked expression of Pete Sohn. It’s a tear-soaked “thank you” to his hardworking, frustrating, culture-clashing parents who didn’t live to see it. And it’s a manifestation of Sohn’s big, blubbering heart, as well as his inner inferno. “I will say, he has a dark side,” says Docter. “When it showed up for the first time, I was kind of shocked, because he’s so effervescent and bubbly most of the time. I saw: Oh, he’s got some anger. A lot of it relates to his parents, which I think he would tell you.”

Sohn’s brother was in town for the big premiere too. “He’s lived there in New York with, essentially, the husk of our parents’ lives, the home and everything,” Sohn told me. “After this is all done, I’m going to go back over there, and we’re going to clean out everything and sell the home.”

He was anxious (again) about how his brother would receive Elemental. “I hope to God that he enjoys it and we can share and close the door on our parents. And then I’m going to take him to Disneyland. He hasn’t been.”

Tim Greiving is a film music journalist in Los Angeles and a regular contributor to NPR, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Find him at timgreiving.com.