Peter Sohn’s animation is warm, handsome and too often held back by its storytelling. We find more to like in Ember and Wade’s romance in Elemental than in the busy city built around it.
Fi1m perspective
In Elemental (2023), a burst pipe brings a city inspector into a fire family’s shop, where he has to report the leak. Peter Sohn has put a promising couple together and immediately given them administrative work. The attraction between Ember and Wade makes this a decent, good-hearted romance, but the repeated attention to plumbing keeps getting in its way. Sohn’s problem as a director is judging how much story those characters need before he can leave them to it.
Sohn’s work has crossed art, story, animation and voice, a useful background for someone directing an animated city. Brad Bird was an early mentor and collaborator, and directed Ratatouille (2007), in which Sohn voices Emile. We recommend that film without hesitation: its precise animation and the seriousness it grants a rat’s wish to cook keep the unlikely premise persuasive. It also provides a useful comparison with Sohn’s directing, where the central desire can get lost amid the surrounding activity.
His directing began with the short Partly Cloudy (2009). The first feature, The Good Dinosaur (2015), was an assignment he took over during production, and its thin story is a limitation we cannot overlook. Elemental, his second feature, moves towards personal material, drawing on his parents’ immigration experience. That gives the expectations surrounding Ember something concrete: her parents run a shop and expect her to take it over. The trouble is that the script keeps adding complications to a conflict we already understand.
Firetown’s stacked shopfronts and coloured lanterns make the family’s neighbourhood worth looking around, but Sohn is better still when he narrows his attention to the couple. We were touched by Ember and Wade’s time alone together, because their attraction finally received the attention it deserved. Too much of the film takes them away from each other to deal with the city’s problems, and the handsome setting cannot compensate for that. Try Elemental for the romance, with patience for the interruptions.
Biography
Peter Sohn is an American filmmaker, animator and voice actor at Pixar Animation Studios. He joined the studio in 2000 and contributed to the art and story departments on films including Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007) and WALL·E (2008). He made his directorial debut with the short film Partly Cloudy (2009).
Sohn directed the feature films The Good Dinosaur (2015) and Elemental (2023), the latter of which he also wrote the story for. He has provided voices for characters including Emile in Ratatouille (2007), Squishy in Monsters University (2013), Ciccio in Luca (2021) and Sox in Lightyear (2022). He trained at the California Institute of the Arts and previously worked at Warner Bros. and Disney Television.
