Disney and Pixar have started teasing details about their next surely beautiful to look at and emotional as heck animated feature, Elemental. Directed by Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur), the film will focus on characters named Ember and Wade in a city where residents representing the — you guessed it — four elements live together. According to Sohn, the film will pull heavily from his early years living in New York with his immigrant parents.
“My parents emigrated from Korea in the early 1970s and built a bustling grocery store in the Bronx. We were among many families who ventured to a new land with hopes and dreams — all of us mixing into one big salad bowl of cultures, languages and beautiful little neighborhoods. That’s what led me to Elemental,” the native New Yorker said in a statement.
You can check out Elemental concept art featuring the fiery young woman Ember and “go with the flow guy” Wade below:
Elemental is tentatively slated to hit theaters on June 23, 2023. We say tentatively because Pixar employees have been bummed to see films like Turning Red and Luca get shifted to Disney+ during the pandemic. Obviously, the situation was unavoidable, and they get why Disney made the call, but these artists were a little let down after working for years for what they thought was a theatrical release.
Hopefully, Elemental will have smoother sailing towards its theatrical release, both for the artists and crew involved in making it and for, like, the rest of society, too. Real win-win there.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)