Exclusive: Elemental’s VFX supervisor on bringing the elements to life in Pixar’s most unlikely film

The journey into Element City where fire, water, land and air reside was full of challenges and had the makers drawing inspiration from everything between Miyazaki’s works to The Godfather II. In an exclusive interview with Filmfare, Elemental’s VFX Supervisor Sanjay Bakshi, best known for The Good Dinosaur and Onward, unpacked the film’s visuals.

What was the brief given to you by the director?

I know Pete Sohn. I’ve worked with him before so I talked to him early on about the story. He wanted to talk about his parents and his immigration experience in the world of elements. He thought that was going to be a good way to convey what it felt like – moving to New York City. And my parents moved from India to Canada. So I related that experience. He wanted to talk to me generally about my experiences and see if they were relatable and universal.

The visuals are very different from any other Pixar movie. What are some of the experiments you wanted to do with this?

Thank you for saying that because that was our intention – to be unique looking. To balance realism and stylisation was the goal. But the stylisation for Pete (Sohn) was that it doesn’t have to look like a comic book or a graphic novel but to be in the medium of computer graphics. You’ll notice that Ember has outline work on her face but it’s dynamic and moving and light. On Wade’s face also you see the line work on the silhouette. If you were to draw that, it would be pencil work. But for Wade, it’s the meniscus that happens in water. It reacts to light and it’s moving so I hope that makes it unique. It’s not trying to look like another medium or hand-drawn stuff but made on the computer using computer graphics.

That’s an interesting question. The early versions of Wade look a lot different than the one in the movie. We spent a lot of time making the character feel watery. We put a lot of work into his face as well. When his mouth’s shape changes, ripples would flow from them and pick up subtle bubbles through his head. But when we got into animation we could see it in the performance. So we had to dial it all back. That is something we had to leave on the cutting room floor. Some of the technology that we developed to make Wade feel watery, we dialled back and we left that for other parts of his body. So he still feels watery but we get the subtle acting that was necessary.

What was the key to achieving Ember’s fiery look and not making it scary?

One thing that we did to stylise her was running something called a pyro simulation to simulate heat. Fire is very distracting and really mesmerising. People can watch fire for hours because it’s constantly changing and it’s so interesting. But if you had that on Ember’s head it would be distracting. We still wanted it to be dynamic. So we used neural-style transfer to organise the flames. It’s still a simulation but we organise it into shapes that somebody has painted. So that simplifies them. That was one of the keys to unlocking the stylisation of Ember.

What were some of the movie references you looked at?

There was a lot. Pete is a cinephile and he really loves movies. There was Hayao Miyazaki – Calcifer is a character we looked at. He’s so funny and 2D and cartoony. These were the fun things we wanted a fire character to do, to change form and still be more realistic. We also looked at immigration movies. Godfather Part II has a beautiful sequence where there’s no dialogue and we see the patriarch Vito Corleone moving to Italy and going through Ellis Island and going through those steps. Not many Bollywood movies, unfortunately.

Yes, earlier on a few Indian movies were used as references but we slowly moved towards making it more universal because now you can’t pinpoint which country it exactly came from. That makes it more relatable.

I think it has evolved a lot. This movie was definitely the most challenging for me on a technical level. The industry is constantly changing. I like the idea of a lot of movies moving a little bit away from realism and towards stylisation. It’s a trend I’m really enjoying. The Spider-Verse films really feel that way. With Elemental it was a goal to make an imaginative world without overwhelming the audiences by being colourful and bold. I hope that continues as a trend in animated movies.

Elemental will release on June 23, 2023.