Disney/Pixar’s Elemental is a heartwarming story of what happens when traditional parents’ expectations clash with generational realities. Framed through the emerging relationship between the fire element Ember (Leah Lewis, of TV’s Nancy Drew) and water element Wade (Mamoudou Athie of Jurassic World: Dominion), the film is a whimsical take on how cultural differences frame perceptions, and how common ground can be found if people are just willing to go looking for them.

Poignant and relatable, Elemental proved particularly resonant for two of the Pinoys who worked on it: Pixar veteran Ronnie Del Carmen, who voices the strait-laced Bernie Lumen, and Aylwin Villanueva, whose work as Sets Technical Lead helped make the film’s incredible visuals possible.

From Cavite to Hollywood

Hailing from Cavite and graduating from the University of Sto. Tomas’ Fine Arts program before moving to the United States in 1989, Del Carmen became an American animation mainstay, beginning as a storyboard artist on shows like Batman: The Animated Series in the early ‘90s before joining Dreamworks Animation to serve as story supervisor on films such as Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado. In 2000, Del Carmen would make the move to Pixar, working on Finding Nemo and Up while doing storyboards for Ratatouille and WALL-E, then going on to co-write and co-direct Inside Out with Pete Docter (Soul).

Animator(s) as voice actor(s)

While Del Carmen has done stand-in (“scratch”) voices on previous productions, Bernie marks the first time he’s been featured as a lead character, a role he first took on as a favor to Elemental director Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur). “It seems to be a trend!” laughs Del Carmen, when asked if his role as and Sohn’s own turn in Across the Spider-Verse (as Miles Morales’ roommate) were indications of voice acting becoming a viable career path for Pixar animators.

“I used to ask Pete to do scratch [stand-in recording] for the movies that we were making,” explains Del Carmen on how he came to be cast as Bernie Lumen. “Since we’re just around [the office], it’s like, ‘Hey, Ronnie, can you help?’, ‘Hey, Pete, can you help?’ Being animation people, we tend to do voices and act and behave as characters all the time, so it’s very easy for us to do it, but I didn’t think about being cast in the movie!”

The road to Bernie

Despite the amount of time it actually takes to make an animated film, Del Carmen, who left Pixar to develop projects for Netflix in 2021, remembers how he got cast in the final movie: “So Pete tells me, ‘Ronnie, I put your voice in the reels,’ and, ‘I really liked you as Bernie.’ And I’m thinking, ‘That’s good, Pete. You go and hire whoever is the best for your movie.’ Then one day, I get a call, like, ‘Ronnie, congratulations – you’re Bernie! We just cast you!” Crazy! He was serious that he loved the voice that I was doing for him, and I wasn’t gonna go and talk myself out of a job, so, of course, I said, ‘Yes!’ and ‘Thank you!’”

While Pete Sohn was ultimately in charge of what made it to the final film, Del Carmen had plenty of material to draw from in portraying an immigrant dad, having already raised two children — including a daughter — of his own.

“Bernie is very proud. He has a lot of pride, and rightly so — he’s created a life for his family against all the odds,” says del Carmen. “And he has an investment in his daughter; he knows that she is the best, and [he] loves her to death. And I’m thinking, that’s great, that means that I can take however I am as a father to my own daughter — which is a different temperament, different kind of tone — and I get to channel that for Bernie as a prideful, fiery father.”

Meet the characters

As the patriarch of the Lumen family’s Elemental City branch, Bernie hasn’t lost touch with his heritage, proudly selling traditional dishes and products from the small shop he operates with his wife Cinder (Shila Ommi, Apple TV’s Tehran), and their temperamental daughter, Ember.

While Ember tries to live up to her family’s hopes and dreams, she’s beginning to find that her interests lie in more creative pursuits than running a shop. One day, Ember is in the process of suppressing her fiery temper when she inadvertently crosses paths with Wade, a health inspector whose dedication to his job could spell the end of everything the Lumens have worked to achieve. With her father on the eve of retirement, and Ember lined up to take his place behind the counter, the two mismatched elements will need to work together to save Bernie’s dream.

The world of Elemental

Elemental’s narrative is representative of the current trend of filmmakers working out their parental traumas (Encanto, Turning Red, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Shang-Chi) on the biggest, most public canvas possible, to be sure, but where it absolutely stands apart with regard to its incredible visuals and production design.

From the products that adorn Bernie’s shelves to the bustling streets of Element City, the film is awash with endlessly inventive design choices to accommodate (and take advantage of) the characters’ respective physical properties, be they fire, water, cloud, or plant person. With each element analogous to a different ethnic group, there’s no end to the visual ingenuity on display, as the animators clearly had a field day in bringing it all to life.

Going into detail(s)

Of course, more details in a computer-generated world mean more computing power, and at some point, it’s someone’s job to figure out how to make that all happen from a practical standpoint. For Elemental, that person was Aylwin Villanueva. A former technical director at visual effects powerhouse Industrial Light & Magic (Star Wars, Jurassic Park), Villanueva worked on films such as the Star Wars sequel trilogy and Avengers Endgame before moving to Pixar in 2021. For Elemental, Villanueva relished the challenge of taking on an animated world that only existed on the computer.

“To me, there’s, a bigger sense of like pride,” says Villanueva, on the shift from live-action to animation. “That’s the first thing I immediately felt, because the story, the art, the whole world is created in-house, here at the studio. Versus with visual effects [for live action], which is more client-based, where people are hiring Industrial Light and Magic to [just] do the computer graphics work, so there’s a little bit of disconnect as to what you’re working on. It’s like a client tells you, ‘Work on this, we need to get this done,’ and you get it done, and that’s pretty much it.

Building better elements

For this film, Villanueva says a large part of his job as Sets Technical Director involved, “Trying to figure out a way how to make our sets more efficient in terms of rendering, but also, how does it make it more efficient for other people, and reduce the amount of work needed. An example of that is, we developed a system to have our modelers –who don’t typically animate — where they can do a little bit of simple animation (like propellers for air buildings, you know, or like fans or kites, etc). That way, the Animation guys can focus on characters, because there’s so much work to do. It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re already modeling these buildings. We know what should be moving for these buildings, why don’t we just do it, and then have that work throughout different shots instead of the animation team doing it.”

A father’s pride

To Villanueva, Elemental’s themes of acceptance in the context of an immigrant seeking validation from their parents rang true, both as the child of Fil-Chinese parents who moved to the United States in hopes of a better life, and, coincidentally, as a new father himself.

“I have a five-month-old now, and something we talked about recently is like, ‘Oh, what sports are they going to play?’ But like to me, I’m just going to have an open mind, you know? And just support them in any way.”

In any case, Elemental marked one of the few films Villanueva’s worked on that he felt excited for his parents to see: “They’re definitely proud of me, and the movies that I’ve worked on, but like, they’re not going to see Avengers. They’re not going to see Star Wars – there’s nothing for them for there. But for this movie, there’s that parental aspect of tension, conflict, and resolution, leading up to the ending that you saw. So I want them to watch this with me, so I can see them feel those moments as well.”

Elemental is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

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