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Credit: Inside the MagicAfter years of dominating the field of cinematic adaptations that make you sob like a baby, Pixar Animation Studios has been struggling. Elemental, the most recent Pixar film, stumbled at the box office almost immediately (despite rave reviews from critics), with its failure being blamed on everything from misleading marketing to lack of artificial intelligence-aided visuals (thanks, TV’s Jim Cramer) to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The last three Pixar releases, Luca (2021), Turning Red (2022), and the Toy Story spinoff Lightyear (2022), have all underwhelmed and underperformed in one way or another, which means that Pixar is undoubtedly desperate to figure out a way to right the ship. According to the writers of Elemental (which was directed by Peter Sohn), that meant that the studio essentially made the movie in 10 different ways, trying to figure out what could possibly stop it from being a flop.
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Pixar Makes and Remakes Movies
In a recent interview with Bleeding Cool News, Pixar Elemental writers Kat Likkel and John Hoberg revealed that 10 different versions of the movie were made in an attempt to make something that would work. Specifically, Hoberg says that “[T]here was a total of ten versions of this movie. You make a new version of the film every three months.” That sounds like a whole lot of work to make a family movie about fire and water coming together, but presumably, Pixar Animation Studios has a system for these things.
There is no indication that the nine discarded versions of Elemental will ever be available for viewing, but it does sound like they were not just sketches or drafts, but fairly complete variants.
“It’s all hand-drawn to start with,” Hoberg went on to say. “And the voice actors are mostly Pixar employees who come in and do the voices. With each of those versions, there are directions you go are completely different than what ended up in the movie.” This sounds completely in line with reports that Elemental did not originally start out as the heartwarming romantic comedy that it would eventually become and that the movie was intensely retooled during the process.
Hoberg even goes so far as to say that “There were some directions that it’s like, “Wow, that didn’t work at all, but what it makes you realize is when you have characters, and we fell in love with Wade, Ember, Dad, and Wade’s family.” While Elemental does not appear to have worked out at the box office to the studio’s satisfaction, it is nice to know that it worked out on a creative level.
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Creators Are Under Intense Pressure Across the Animation Industry
Pixar’s Elemental was a relatively simple story that takes place in Element City, a world of anthropomorphic fire, water, air, and earth creatures living in segregated districts. Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis), a volatile fire element, falls in love with Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a sensitive water element, and basically, it’s Romeo and Juliet all over again (with a happier ending, don’t worry).
Despite the relative simplicity, any animated film is a huge amount of work for animators, writers, and any creative type. Making a single movie over and over again is a daunting task, and brings to mind reports that the recent Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse producer Phil Lord required animators to near-constantly discard and redo work to his satisfaction.
However, Across the Spider-Verse was a hit at the box office, unlike the latest Pixar offering. Maybe they needed to try for 11 versions instead?