With Elemental, director Peter Sohn joins a still rarified community of filmmakers who’ve managed to direct multiple films at Pixar Animation Studios. Though the numbers in this group have expanded in recent years, there’s still been plenty of people (ranging from Mark Andrews to Brian Fee to Brad Lewis) that have only had one director or co-director credit on a feature-length Pixar release. It’s not always a guarantee that directing one motion picture at this outfit will ensure you get to helm further Pixar movies. However, after directing The Good Dinosaur in 2015, Sohn’s scored a second directorial effort in the form of Elemental.
Anyone who’s been keeping even a passing glance at the career of Sohn over the last two decades won’t be surprised that he’s emerged as a filmmaking fixture at Pixar. Sohn has quietly become an incredibly prominent figure at this animation company, not just as a director but also as the voice actor behind several scene-stealing supporting characters in movies like Ratatouille. His impact on the company’s output is wide-spanning and reaches far beyond his own directorial efforts like Elemental. Such accomplishments make it deeply ironic that Sohn didn’t start his animation career at Pixar Animation Studios, but rather in much different confines at a doomed animation house…
How Did Peter Sohn’s Pixar Career Begin?
Peter Sohn’s first credit as an artist is on the 1999 Brad Bird directorial effort The Iron Giant, a title made for the short-lived Warner Bros. Feature Animation division. This outfit was an attempt by the studio behind Bugs Bunny to get in on the booming animated movie landscape in the 1990s, but none of its titles ever cut the mustard financially. Still, the place gave Sohn his first work as an animator on Giant and Osmosis Jones. Just like Bird, Sohn would soon leave Warner Bros. Feature Animation for Pixar Animation Studios, with Sohn making his credited debut at this studio as a story artist on Finding Nemo.
Sohn proved a very notable artistic voice on Bird’s first two Pixar titles, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, the latter of which had Sohn voicing one of the film’s most notable supporting characters. Here, Sohn lent his pipes to the loveable and chubby rat Emile, the brother to Ratatouille protagonist Remy (Patton Oswalt). It’s not hard to see why Bird and Pixar brass opted to keep Sohn’s temp vocal tracks for Emile rather than hire a celebrity late in production to take over the role. Sohn’s a hoot as Emile, with this animator lending such an endearingly human quality to this rat’s simple aims and pleasures. All Emile wants is to gobble up some food, follow the rules, and see peace in the family. Sohn’s voicework does wonders for establishing that charming personality.
By the end of the decade, Sohn was becoming more and more notable in his creative exploits, with 2009 serving as a watershed year for this artist. For one thing, he directed an original Pixar short entitled Partly Cloudy that ran on all theatrical screenings of Up. That same year, Sohn co-directed the English language dub of the Studio Ghibli feature Ponyo (in the 2000s, it was common for Pixar brass to oversee the English-language dubbing of Studio Ghibli titles). These two endeavors solidified Sohn’s aims to do more than just be a story artist, he was going to be a filmmaker. Soon, he’d get his chance to do just that through the most unexpected series of circumstances.
How Did ‘The Good Dinosaur’ Change Peter Sohn’s Career?
As the 2010s began, Sohn continued to do varying degrees of story artist work on Pixar movies like Toy Story 3 and Brave while he also lent his voice to another scene-stealing Pixar character (this time a monster named Squishy) in the 2013 Pixar movie Monsters University. In the middle of all this, Sohn was planning to co-direct The Good Dinosaur, a Pixar feature initially scheduled for a May 2014 release that was the brainchild of writer/director Bob Peterson.
Typically, the career trajectory for many Pixar filmmakers has been to co-direct a movie (usually after directing a short film, though not always) before becoming a full-fledged director. This isn’t the default norm for some Pixar directors (Domee Shi graduated from short films to directing Turning Red with no prior feature-length co-directing credits), but it’s been the pathway for Pixar filmmakers like Angus MacLane, Adrian Molina, and, initially, Sohn. He did Partly Cloudy, and now he’d direct Good Dinosaur, a film near and dear to Peterson’s heart. Then, down the line, Sohn could direct his own movie. It’s a system that, in theory, helps train filmmakers who’ve never held a position of power like this before on a feature-length project.
However, at the end of 2013, disaster struck the Good Dinosaur production. Peterson was let go from the film and the entire movie would now be overhauled. After a year of radio silence on what was going on with The Good Dinosaur, it was revealed in the final weeks of 2014 (roughly a year before its new Thanksgiving 2015 release date) that Sohn was now directing the feature. He had been upgraded to this position and would now be making his solo feature-length directorial debut much earlier than expected.
While Sohn didn’t come up with the very initial idea of The Good Dinosaur, he did find some personal connection to this material that guided his filmmaking sensibilities. Specifically, Peter Sohn explained to NPR that he related to Good Dinosaur protagonist Arlo and his sense of feeling like an outsider because of his experiences growing up as a person of color in New York. Gaining confidence and confronting fears was something Sohn grappled with for years in his youth, and now, as an adult, those same feelings informed Arlo’s journey. With The Good Dinosaur, Sohn established his affinity for taking deeply personal aspects of his childhood and reflecting them in animation through highly stylized means.
What Has Peter Sohn Created With Pixar Recently?
The same year The Good Dinosaur premiered, Peter Sohn was credited on Inside Out as being a part of the Senior Creative Team at Pixar, the first ever public notice that he had joined this committee. As of last year’s Lightyear, he’s still a part of that team, a reflection of how this former Warner Bros. Feature Animation animator is now one of the most notable figures at Pixar. He further cemented his notoriety within this studio with his memorable voice work as the robotic cat Sox in Lightyear in 2022. This mechanical critter may be more restrained in personality than Emile or Squishy, but it’s another instance of Sohn delivering memorable line deliveries that nobody else could properly execute.
Meanwhile, Sohn’s second feature-length directorial effort, Elemental, is preparing for a global theatrical launch. While Sohn inherited The Good Dinosaur from another filmmaker, he’s built Elemental from the ground up. The deeply personal resonance of this feature is ingrained into its DNA. Sohn has openly talked about how the culture clashes in his own life, namely being a Korean-American who married someone who wasn’t Korean, inspired this original story about physical manifestations of water and fire bonding.
Mismatched pairs run deep throughout Peter Sohn’s work. The passionate cloud and nervous stork at the heart of Partly Cloudy. The timid dinosaur and feral human boy in The Good Dinosaur. The anthropomorphized versions of elements like water and fire populating the world of Elemental. Even in his own career trajectory, dissonance has played a big role. This fixture of Pixar movies originally started out at Warner Bros. while Sohn’s also a story artist/director who’s become so recognizable for his various forays into voice acting. Who could’ve ever predicted he’d find such success in that field? If there’s anything to take away from both Peter Sohn’s works as an artist and his career as a whole, it’s those unexpected pairings can often be the ones that make life a little richer.
