Pixar’s new film Elemental is sweet, funny and inventive. Photo / Supplied
After a run of box office flops, studio boss Pete Docter is worried - the stakes are high for Pixar’s new film.
In 1994 four men had a lunch in California that changed animation for ever. They were Pete Docter, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft — the bigwigs at the nascent Pixar, putting the finishing touches to what would be their first feature film, Toy Story. They were using revolutionary digital techniques and, without the restriction of drawing by hand, the men were freed to dream.
That day, in the Hidden City Cafe, Pixar’s chiefs planned A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and turned animation into something for adults as well as children. Just count the awards that followed what was probably Hollywood’s most productive lunch — 50 Oscar nominations, 18 wins.
Now, nearly 30 years later, they have hit a rocky patch. Elemental has opened in the US to Pixar’s worst box office — US$29.5 million is US$10 million below Pixar’s previous biggest flop, The Good Dinosaur (2015). And it’s not just a one-off. Much more was expected from last year’s Toy Story prequel, Lightyear.
“It’s a huge concern,” admits Docter, who is now the chief creative officer of Pixar. “They call it showbusiness for a reason, not show-show. If we don’t do well at the box office we have to think more deeply about what we make. Our job is to understand why it didn’t land in the way we were hoping.”
It is not all black and white — Pixar’s parent company, Disney, has recently been pushing its streaming service, Disney+, so families don’t have to wait so long before they can see films at home. But, as a result, Pixar films take a hit at the box office.
So how is Pixar going to get bums, of all ages, back on cinema seats? Creating cartoons that grown-ups enjoy is not new. Indeed, Walt Disney himself said: “I make films for the child in all of us — six or sixty.”
Yet Pixar did that with a twist and tackling such adult subjects as grief and the apocalypse. Never more so than in Up, when we relive old Carl’s life with his wife before her death. See also the brilliant Soul, with Pixar’s first black lead character, which is about the right time to die. Questlove, a voice actor in the film, said he always thought Pixar made films for kids that adults can like, but that Soul was a film for adults that kids could like as well.
“That’s the whole trick,” explains Docter, who directed Up. “Some people make films explicitly targeted to kids, but I’m not sure how to think that way. On Up I thought, ‘How are my kids going to connect to this?’ So I put in slapstick, like a weird bird. You build it in layers, but we think of the audience as adults. What’s the real-life situation this monster or car would find themselves in that resonates for me as an adult? Dealing with loss or having children? You want something to engage and think about, like where we go when we die. That’s engaging stuff.”
Which leads us to Elemental and why, in America, audiences stayed home. It is, like the best Pixar originals, born out of something personal — a love letter from the director Peter Sohn to his parents, Korean immigrants who came to America. That is the adult idea, but one placed in a vibrant, child-friendly melting pot of a city where Fire and Water — the elements — live in segregated districts. Two characters from opposite sides of the track fall in love and, before anyone can say West Side Story, you have a culture-clash romance that suggests, of course, that everyone should just get along.
It is a sweet, funny and inventive film, which will move people. It even draws on Sidney Poitier’s Sixties landmark Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Yet Sohn, a friendly, quiet man, appears to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. His parents died during the creation of a film dreamt up to honour them. Crushingly he is unsure what they would have made of it. “I don’t know if my parents would have connected with it,” he admits.
His film about the bliss of an integrated society was released into a divided America. “At the time my mother passed there was so much anti-Asian stuff — it was scary for her. She was telling me not to go outside. And at the same time I was making this hopeful thing. Like, ‘Mum! You’re loved. It’s fine . . .’
“Then our film came out and the box office is low,” he continues, reflecting sadly on Pixar’s malaise. “Is that a reflection of its messaging? I don’t know. The goal is to connect to all audiences, but at the same time this was about honouring my parents.”
Sohn was schooled in knowing what makes a Pixar hit. He began there two decades ago as a sketch artist on Finding Nemo, inspired by Toy Story, which blew him away. Computer generation made the toys look more real than if they were drawn, and that was key for adults. Sohn adds that Pixar was also “irreverent”. It was started during an era of cartoon musicals and villains, but did neither.
Yet while WALL-E and Up opened to more than US$60 million each, Pixar’s new films are not getting close. And as well as those first classics, the studio also gifted us strikingly original work, but the worry is that with dwindling box office it will abandon that for yet more sequels. Toy Story 5 is coming. I ask Docter whether reverting to what is known is a sign of unpredictable times.
“For sure,” the boss admits. “It’s funny because, right now, people coming out of the pandemic want the comfort of ‘Oh I know these characters’. But that won’t continue for ever and it’s imperative we continue to balance out sequels. We [will] continue to surprise people.”
Elemental is in cinemas now.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
Charli XCX, Post Malone, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar among other major nominees.