This article was written for the May-June ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 350).

“The hope is that Elio will inspire kids and adults to be more curious about space, about what could be out there for all of us and to find their own place to belong here on Earth.”

— Director Domee Shi

Some of the highest-grossing films of all time speculate on the existence of aliens and center on abductions. There are also those rarer films that take a more curious than fearful view of extraterrestrials, wondering if we might be able to connect with them somehow. Pixar’s new summer movie Elio follows the latter tradition.

Like so many of us here on Earth, the movie’s central character feels alone and out of place much of the time. So he sets out to encourage any aliens who might be around to abduct him in the hopes of finding somewhere he belongs.

The film brings together some of the studio’s finest young talents. Elio is directed by Domee Shi (Turning Red), Madeline Sharafian (an Academy Award nominee for the animated short Burrow) and Adrian Molina (Coco). These three creators also have story credits on the movie. Acclaimed veteran production designer Harley Jessup worked on the film as well. Jude Brownbill (The Incredibles 2, Turning Red) and Travis Hathaway (Inside Out) were animation supervisors on the project.

Alien Resurrection

As the filmmakers shaped Elio’s quest to be abducted, they looked to inspiration from classic films that featured alien life-forms such as Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien.

“The story was originally conceived by Adrian Molina, one of the directors of the movie,” says Shi. “He pretty much based Elio a lot on himself. You know, his mother worked for the military. He always felt like an odd kid on the military base. But, then, when he had to step away to co-direct Coco 2, he entrusted the movie to [Sharafian], and then eventually to me as well, and our inspiration, when we approached Elio, was tapping into our own childhoods of feeling lonely and wanting connection and wanting to feel belonging somewhere in the universe.”

“We had a lot of fun picking the color script for the film. We both love really bold color choices, and we wanted the days on Earth for Elio to feel like he was the odd man out.”

— Director Madeline Sharafian

Shi explains that, in the beginning, Elio is obsessed with getting abducted by aliens and with going into space. “I think that is how a lot of us have felt at that age,” she notes. “Even when we’re older now, just like really wanting and dreaming of finding a place where you belong, where you don’t feel alone. That’s the inspiration that we were drawing from ourselves and putting into Elio.”

“Also, the fact that he’s just a big space nerd is very relatable for me,” adds Shi. “I’m not a space nerd, but I’m a huge animation nerd, anime nerd. I remember when I first went to my first anime convention in high school, I felt the way Elio feels in the movie when he’s abducted and he meets the aliens. I felt like I was finally in the right place, I’m with my people. So that’s kind of the emotion that we were drawing on.”

True Colors

As the story came together, these inspirations helped form the color scheme for the movie. The filmmakers wanted to convey the hope and curiosity of space but also the delightfully weird aspects of it.

“We had a lot of fun picking the color script for the film,” says Sharafian. “We both love really bold color choices, and we wanted the days on Earth for Elio to feel like he was the odd man out. So we gave him this really electric kind of alien, classic little green man look. That green color goes through Act 1. Once he’s in space, we really needed it to feel like his own personal heaven. We amped up the colors. It’s super saturated. It’s just this beautiful, kaleidoscopic place, because it has to feel to him, and to the audience, that this is a place that he should never leave, and maybe he possibly can get to stay there forever. The colors are gorgeous. I think our production designer, Harley Jessup, and our lighting DP, Jordan Rempel, really went all out. They turned it up to 11.”

As the directors came to the animation supervisors with ideas for how to depict the aliens, it became clear there was some heavy lifting to do. They were creating the rules not only for an alien environment but for how the aliens themselves would look. Often, it came down to just trying many different things until one pass worked and the character emerged.

“I think the Ooooo (Elio’s alien friend) character probably was the one that scared us the most,” says Brownbill. “And then one day, you know, one of the animators came to us with this demo of something, and it was like, wow, the look of the character was solved. The way it was presented made it look all too easy, too. That character had been one of the biggest problems to solve, but then it was almost the most fun to animate. Because of the endless possibilities of animating a character that was sort of liquid in a way but also had other elements, it opened up so many ideas about how it could be done and what we could do to make it special.”

According to the film’s VFX supervisor Claudia Chung-Sani, to bring Oooooo (the liquid supercomputer) to animated life, the Pixar team took decades-old technology called metaballs and engineered it into a new innovative process. “Oooooo is Pixar’s first topology-free character rig,” she explains. “She is an arrangement of implicit shapes (i.e., she exists only in math equations) that blend together to give Pixar animators unprecedented flexibility and speed to achieve Ooooo’s many functions and endearing performances, while maintaining a liquid, blobby shape. To add even more complexity, Ooooo has circuitry and glow flowing through her shapes in a continuous cohesive display: This is traditionally challenging when working with implicit surfaces.”

Chung-Sani continues, “Imagine playing with clay in real life. As you push and pull it into shapes, the clay automatically paints itself into a translucent sculpture complete with internal pulsing circuitry. This would be impossible in real life, but very much a reality in the Communiverse!”

For Jessup, being the production designer on Elio was especially meaningful because he started his career at ILM as an art director. Calling on his experiences there dealing with outer space, aliens and fantasy films, the project became a way to find a new perspective on space. He says he tried to make the universe especially playful.

“I was focused on the idea that this kind of futuristic environment is not dystopian,” he says. “It’s not a scary version of the space. There are exciting parts of it, but we wanted to see it through Elio’s eyes, where it does look inviting and you can see how he would actually want to stay there, which was an important story point. And contrasting that then with the more neutral, severe color palette on Earth at the Air Force base, we wanted to really work those two contrasts between a hard edge of materials. So you see this kind of concrete, asphalt environment of the Air Force base, contrasting to the translucent fluid around its shapes of what Elio sees in space.

“At one point, Pete Docter said we should think of the Air Force base as a concrete parking lot,” Jessup continues. “It wants to be that big of a contrast to what Elio is going to see in outer space. And he should almost feel the most alien when he is on Earth, because he clearly doesn’t fit in there. So those were interesting ideas that we were playing with.”

For this group of filmmakers, each with their own ideas about feeling out of place and wanting to help Elio convey his quest to belong, crafting this movie quickly took on personal meaning. They’re hopeful audiences get a sense of that hopeful journey. Shi herself drew from her own path and her culture.

“We definitely hope kids who might feel alone or out of place take something from this, because that was something that I felt when I started to feel like an animation nerd,” says Shi. “The hope is that Elio will inspire kids and adults to be more curious about space, about what could be out there for all of us and to find their own place to belong here on Earth. I think it was important for us as we made this movie just [to] have it be this message of hope, of wonder, of seeking out connection.”

She says that idea is something Elio learns throughout his journey. “He learns that belonging isn’t arriving at a place where everyone immediately gets along with you,” Shi concludes. “It’s actually reaching out. It’s putting it upon yourself to extend your hand and help somebody in need, or if they don’t understand, you try to kind of make them understand. Or if you see someone in trouble, to help them out. It’s seeing your journey as a way to connect with others and find your place with others.”

Disney will release Pixar’s Elio in theaters on June 20.

A Final Space Odyssey

For Oscar winner Harley Jessup, wrapping up production on Elio also meant bringing his time at Pixar to a close. The 71-year-old production designer says he’ll retire after making six films with the Bay Area studio.

“Working with Pixar has been so memorable, I’ve worked with many wonderful artists,” says Jessup. “One thing I’ve learned is that I have to be careful about giving advice to other production designers, because so many times I’m learning from them, even though I’m the oldest guy in the department right now. I’ve learned everybody does it in a different way, they’re bringing different skills to the table. I think there’s the discipline that we all have in common, and I’m a firm believer in doing very thorough research, visual research, on every aspect, every prop, every setting, every character, so that we can get the world feeling as authentic and believable as we can. And the audience, I think, picks up on it.”

Jessup’s work with Pixar includes Monsters Inc., Ratatouille, The Good Dinosaur, Coco, in addition to Elio. Before joining Pixar, he was a visual effects art director for the legendary ILM from 1987 to 1994. There he worked on Innerspace, for which he won an Oscar for best visual effects. He also worked on Hook, which earned him a visual effects Oscar nomination, and The Hunt for Red October.

“Even after doing Elio, my sixth feature at Pixar, every one of them you kind of start from scratch. It’s a whole new world with each film. That’s the challenge, but it’s also the fun part of getting to research and learn about and think about a new space. I’m kind of going through withdrawal right now. I kind of do after every movie, where I feel sad to not be thinking about it anymore. So it’s the same thing with Elio. It’s been really fun thinking about the outer space environments. It was a challenge, I think, trying to think up a new version of space. And I’m going to miss that, as we kind of finish up on it.”