Inside the restaurant, Sohn recognizes the waiter. 'It was my parents' happy place,' he recalls. When the shop did well, Sohn's family would go to Chinatown, especially the restaurant Hop Kee. 'My mother was the cashier and my father kept working this four in the morning 'till 11:00 at night job, seven days a week.' In Elemental, the father also works long hours. Sohn's parents, Korean immigrants, owned a grocery store in the Bronx.īetween the cart and other odd jobs, Sohn says his father saved enough money to buy a bodega-style grocery store in the Bronx. NPR 'It was my parents' happy place,' says Pixar filmmaker Peter Sohn of the restaurant Hop Kee in New York's Chinatown. 'And then the other $75 would go to renting a hotdog cart,' selling hotdogs, pretzels and icies in Manhattan. '$75 of that would go to rent in, I guess it would be like a prostitute apartment because, a kid, he would just say, 'hooker house, hooker house.'' Sohn says he and his brother 'had no idea' what their dad was talking about. Sohn's father emigrated to New York from Korea in 1969 with $150. Element City, as it's called in the movie, is 'very much based off of these immigrant neighborhoods,' including Little Italy and Koreatown, 'I was so inspired by that,' says Sohn.Įlemental was a chance to put his family's story on screen New York City's different cultures inspired the metropolis in Elemental. But when it came to the movies, there's this Venn diagram where we could connect.' 'I spoke English better than I did Korean, and so much of growing up was this battle to try to understand each other. 'My mother's love for movies was this weird way that we could communicate because she didn't speak English very well,' he remembers. We did, but we also talked a lot about his parents. I thought we'd be talking about the ins and outs of filmmaking. I recently met Peter Sohn in Chinatown where he and his family celebrated special occasions. Getty Images for Disney Pete Docter, Pixar Animation Studio's chief creative officer, left, and filmmaker Peter Sohn attend the World Premiere of Elemental at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on June 8, 2023. His physical appearance even inspired the character Russell in Up. In The Good Dinosaur, which Sohn also directed, he plays Forrest Woodbush (a.k.a. Sohn's Pixar colleagues have also recruited him to voice some of their characters including Emile in Ratatouille, Scott 'Squishy' Squibbles in Monsters University and Sox in Lightyear. 'He's a genius story guy, a brilliant designer. 'He can do everything,' says Pete Docter, Pixar Animation Studio's chief creative officer and Elemental's executive producer. It was Sohn who helped design such memorable scenes as the dentist's office in Finding Nemo and the gazillion balloons lifting Carl's house over the city in Up. His credits include WALL-E, Brave and The Incredibles. He joined the company in 2000, working in the art and story departments.

There are all these disparate cultures mixing together.' Growing up in New York as the son of Korean immigrants, 'There was a beautiful metaphor for me in this table of elements. But don't trust helium because they're gassy.''Ĭoming up with jokes for boron and argon was trickier so, in the interest of storytelling possibilities, Sohn boiled the elements down to the classics: fire, water, earth and air. I would come up with jokes like, 'Copper lives next to helium. 'These blocks and the atomic number and the name to me was like a family or a person that lived there. 'All I saw were apartment buildings,' he says. The seeds of the idea for Elemental came to Peter Sohn many years ago, in a middle school science class, looking at the periodic table.

Earth wind fire water