Grab your Luxo balls and get inside the Pizza Planet Truck. Pixar just dropped a teaser trailer for its upcoming animated feature, Elemental. The Disney Pixar film takes us to Element City, a grand metropolis where residents of all four elements (Fire, water, air, and earth) live together. Think of it like Zootopia mixed Avatar: The Last Airbender with the traditional Pixar flare.
However, instead of century-long wars or police investigations, the story revolves around the romance between Ember, a fire resident, and Wade, a water resident, and how their very different natures inspire each other to change. In addition to the trailer below, Pixar also released a new poster for Elemental.
The film’s director is longtime Pixar brain trust member Peter Sohn, who also directed the 2015 Pixar film The Good Dinosaur and worked as a story artist in Luca. Elemental is scheduled to be released next summer and features the voice talents of Leah Lewis, who starred in the Netflix film The Half of it, as the fiery Ember. And Mamoudou Athie, who starred in the Netflix series Archive 81 and Jurassic World Dominion, voices go-with-the-flow Wade.
The teaser for Elemental focuses mostly on world-building. It opens with the Pixar lamp morphing into the light of what seems to be a mixture between a subway train and a boat. The water-train stops at a station that shows that it’s approaching Element City, and Ember puts on her headphones and jumps in as the song “Hell N Back” by Bakar plays.
Inside the subway, we’re introduced to the inhabitants of Element City. They all show interesting variations of what can be done with the premise of “residents made of earth, fire, earth, and water.” We see an earth resident with a tree on their head. Air residents shaped like clouds sit upside-down on the ceiling and baby earth residents in potted plants. At the stop, Ember’s headphones fall and as she approaches to pick them up, her hand touches Wade’s watery and translucent hand. The screen cuts to black and we hear the audio of them introducing themselves.
Elemental releases on June 16, 2023 and looks like an interesting addition to the Pixar canon. Watch the trailer here.
Featured image courtesy of Disney Pixar.
