This year, Pixar fans were fortunate to be treated to two movies from the Disney computer animation studio: Turning Red and Lightyear. In 2023, there will only one cinematic Pixar offering, but it looks to be quite a doozy. We got our first look at Elemental back in May, and half a year later, the first trailer for the 2023 movie release has arrived, giving us the first footage of this world full of sentient elements.
Among the things we already knew about Elemental before today was that this movie is set in a world where elements like fire, water, land and air have taken anthropomorphic form and walk around like people. This trailer gives us our first taste of what that looks like, from sentient clouds getting to hang out on the roof of the subway car to a ground mother being exhausted by her potted plant babies. Based off this teaser trailer alone, while Elemental is certainly delivering one of Pixar’s kookier concepts, as with nearly everything the studio delivers to the public, it’s a visually dazzling affair and will surely be entertaining for moviegoers of all ages.
It’s only towards the end of the Elemental trailer that we get an inkling of this movie’s main story. A fire woman named Ember, voiced by Nancy Drew’s Leah Lewis, goes to pick up her headphones after they’re knocked off her hooded head, but so does a nearby water man named Wade, voiced by Jurassic World Dominion’s Mamoudou Athie. We only hear them introduce themselves before the preview concludes, but make no mistake, sparks are now flying between them. Hang on, does sentient electricity exist in the Elemental world? I digress, the point is that Elemental will follow Ember and Wade discovering they have more in common with each other than two people from their respective elemental groups would expect.
Specifically what awaits Ember and Wade on their personal journey together is being kept under wraps for now, but Elemental is being directed by Peter Sohn, who’s been part of Pixar since the Finding Nemo days and previously helmed The Good Dinosaur. Not only that, Elemental is Sohn’s brainchild, with the filmmaker saying that his childhood growing up as son of Korean immigrants in the 1970s inspired the story. Elemental is produced by Denise Ream, whose past Pixar credits include the aforementioned The Good Dinosaur, Up, Cars 2 and Toy Story 4.
Elemental premieres in theaters on June 16, 2023, and as more details about the next Pixar movie come in, we’ll pass them along. If you’d like to keep entertained with other Pixar content until then, just make sure you’re subscribed to Disney+. Once your watch party’s done, check out our ranking of the Pixar movies. Also, don’t forget that 2024 will not only bring another original Pixar movie in the form of Elio, we’ll also be getting the sequel to Inside Out.
