Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
In 2015, Pixar’s “Inside Out” helped kids understand such emotions as Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust.
This Friday, Pixar’s “Elemental” mines a social commentary from natural elements like Fire, Water, Land and Air.
“This is the most stunning animation that I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Actress Shila Ommi told WTOP. “You’re talking about a fire being (who) emits light and is moving all the time and is translucent and transparent at certain parts. When a fire being is next to a water being, the first is shedding light on the water being, so the water being is reflecting light off the fire. … Then the music by Thomas Newman, it really feels like you are on a journey.”
Set in Element City, the story opens with the residents of Fire, Water, Land and Air living together. Here, a fiery young woman, Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis), befriends a chill water dude, Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie).
“She’s a tough, beautiful, sexy, fiery, quick-witted young woman in her 20s and she finds a very unlikely friendship with a fun, sappy, go-with-the-flow guy named Wade,” Ommi said. “This friendship challenges her beliefs about not just the world that she lives in but also about herself and her deepest desires. It’s a film in which opposites react.”
Thus, the film becomes a larger social commentary on different races coexisting despite their differences with Catherine O’Hara (“Schitt’s Creek”) and Wendi McLendon-Covey (“The Goldbergs”) voicing various elements.
“Water moved into this city first, so the city is conducive to water elements, inspired by cities like Venice and Amsterdam that have canals,” Ommi said. “Fire elements living in a Water town are feeling very marginalized. It’s not very comfortable for them, so they feel very much like immigrants. … Ember has a bit of a chip on her shoulder at the beginning and she’s got anger issues and part of it is living in a town that’s not easy for her and her family.”
Ommi plays Ember’s loving mother, Cinder, who is also Fire Town’s resident matchmaker with a natural gift to smell true love in a Fire person’s smoke. Ironically, she has been unable to find a match for her own daughter, who is next in line to take over the family convenience store run by husband, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen).
“This is a little bit of a love story between a father and a daughter,” Ommi said. “Bernie really wants Ember to grow up and take over the store that we’ve created in Fire Town. Ember, being a child of immigrants, has a lot of guilt and is keenly aware of the sacrifices that her mom and dad made to give her a better life, so she really wants to make her dad proud to the point of living in a way that might not be the best for her as long as it makes him happy.”
The film is directed and co-written by Peter Sohn (“The Good Dinosaur”), who himself is the son of Korean immigrants, while Ronnie del Carmen is a Filipino immigrant and Ommi is an Iranian immigrant. Born in Tehran, Ommi grew up with her poet mother and real-estate mogul father, who founded one of Iran’s largest construction companies, Vima Co., before the family was forced to move to Los Angeles during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
“My sister was going to UCLA at the time the revolution broke out in Iran,” Ommi said. “My dad was on an execution list when the new government took over because he many years before was a colonel in the Shah’s army and a philanthropist and worked very hard to become a successful businessman. They connected him to ‘The Other,’ to the monarchy, though his beliefs were kind of leftist, even though he was a successful capitalist.”
Fittingly, Ommi played a refugee mother in the Mike Nichols film “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007) and has more recently appeared in the Apple TV+ series like “Little America” (2020) and “Tehran” (2020-present).
“How excited am I?” Ommi said. “Certainly with ‘Elemental’ to be working with these icons who have created some of the most impactful moments on screen, I just have to pinch myself everyday.”
Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
