Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina
Writers: Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones
Story Developed By: Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Julia Cho
This review contains spoilers.
Before I start this review: I had no idea about the DRAMA surrounding this film before I saw it, I love Pixar movies and WALL·E (2008) is an excellent science fiction movie that stands up to live action others, so I just went into the theatre excited for a new Pixar SF. But the drama is relevant in the context of this project about women-directed SF. Yes, the film is now co-directed by two women, but Adrian Molina (who co-directed Coco) was the original lead director, and a lot of his personal experience underpins the film including the Latinx lead, military base setting, and intended queer coding of the lead character Elio. Molina exited the project in August 2023 (officially, to go on to direct Coco 2), and Turning Red’s director Domee Shi and first-time feature director Madeline Sharafian were brought in to rework and complete the film for release.
Rumours suggest that studio dislike of the queerness of Elio as part of openly gay director Molina’s vision – now erased – was part of the reason for his departure. As one Pixar artist explained to The Hollywood Reporter “it was pretty clear through the production of the first version of the film that [studio leaders] were constantly sanding down these moments in the film that alluded to Elio’s sexuality of being queer.” The film was delayed by a year, meaning it opened alongside Disney’s own live-action Lilo & Stitch and Dreamwork’s live-action How to Train Your Dragon. And, despite positive reviews, the film has been Pixar’s worst opening weekend and very likely to make a loss. Last summer (June 2024) Last June, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 was a billion dollar movie that was one of biggest films worldwide. Family movies are back brining in the billions but they were almost exclusively sequels, prequels, and remakes of existing properties. Elio is one of the few original concept films for this target audience, and it couldn’t compete.
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself”
Carl Sagan (Cosmos, 1980)
When I watched the credits for the film, I was struck how many women appeared on those first lead creatives credit screens. I don’t know how much change there was after Molina left the project, but I do know that Julia Cho is listed as the lead writer, and producer Mary Alice Drumm was part of the project from its early days of development. So even if the excitement of having a new Pixar film (and one of their science-based ones) directed by a woman is a little tainted there are women in key creative positions throughout the film’s beleaguered production life. Elio is only the third Pixar film to be released with women directors (see also Brave co-directed by Brenda Chapman [there was drama there too] and Turning Red) and Domee Chi’s Turning Read remains the ONLY Pixar film solo-directed by a woman.
I genuinely enjoyed Elio. I laughed and cried, and got excited about the science content. The titular character is an 11-year-old orphan, a space-alien obsessive looking to escape his current life who makes first contact using ham radio and is mistaken for the ambassador of Earth and beamed up by/to the Communiverse. This intergalactic hub brings together all the knowledge and experience of intelligent life from across the universe. When Elio arrives there is another candidate for membership to the Communiverse – an armored worm-like warlord called Grigon who wants access to its resources to dominate and colonise. The ambassadors vote not to admit him, so he threatens war to get what he wants. Fearful of the members of the Communiverse finding out that he is in fact not the leader of Earth but actually a child, Elio volunteers to negotiate with Grigon on his warship. There he fails at negotiating but finds and befriends the amiable Glordon who is revealed to be the placid son of the warlord and his father’s only emotional soft spot.
“We met with Dr Jill Tarter early on—she’s one of the founding members of the SETI [Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence] Institute. She is an astronomer who’s studied extraterrestrial intelligence. She taught us to think about space in a more expansive way that in turn made us feel more connected here. We’re all Earthlings. There’s a strong theme of connection in this story that really resonated with all of us.”
The film is indebted to Carl Sagan’s hopeful approach to space exploration and the possibility for communication with extraterrestrial life. Sagan’s Cosmos and Contact are both referenced as touchstones by producers and there are some interesting links to Sagan and his work across the film. He even appears in a cameo as part of the soundtrack. The film opens with a sequence in a science museum when Elio discovers an exhibition about Voyager and the Golden Record – that Sagan helped to curate – that offers both the protagonist, and the children (and adults) watching a history of science and technology.
By grounding itself in real world history of science and technology and feasible science futures, Elio contributes to the public understanding of science. Images of the records are accurate, the rendering of Earth (Pale Blue Dot style) and Voyager are stunning, and (other than the Canadian voice which was re-recorded) the recording excerpts are original. A Golden Record was attached to both Voyager probes. It was a phonograph with both sounds and data intended to explain our planet and humanity in 117 pictures, greetings in 54 different languages (plus one from humpback whales, Dory would approve), a selection of “the sounds of Earth”, and 90 minutes of music. The Space sequences are animated, but in a way that functions as a mini-documentary of the real scientific context that the film is built upon. As senior software engineer at Pixar Nick Porcino explains “it doesn’t switch into the fantastical until later in the sequence, so I think kids will figure out that they are learning about something that is real.” Elio’s adventure starts when a Voyager probe is intercepted by extraterrestrials and translated.
One thing would be clear about us: no one sends such a message on such a journey, to other worlds and beings, without a positive passion for the future. For all the possible vagaries of the message, they could be sure that we were a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos
– Carl Sagan, ‘Epilogue’, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (1978)
The universe imagined via the Communiverse shows a variety of non-human forms with different communication styles that are simultaneously translated by a Babel Fish/universal translator tag. Knowledge is stored and recalled in a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy equivalent called the Universal Users Manual (voiced by Bob Peterson, aka ultimate good dog Dug) which asks if Elio wants to know the meaning of life. He doesn’t.. He wants to know how to negotiate and reads a version of he Art of the Deal perhaps showing up that this film’s first cut was finished in 2023 and a second term of Trump seemed far-fetched and thus as Peter Bradshaw notes, as ‘apt for marginal humour and safely confined to the dustbin of history?’. But Trump scarily regenerated.
From the early stages of the development of Elio,SETI were involved as advisors to ensure that the film presented a believable representation of the search for extraterrestrials. Jill Tarter was the primary science advisor here; Tarter was also the inspiration for Sagan’s main character – Ellie – in his novel Contact, portrayed by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie adaptation. SETI advice was given on key concepts such as the use of technosignature searches, imagining aliens beyond little green humanoids, and the history and design of the Voyager Golden Record (and the work of astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake) as humanity’s most sustained attempt at METI (Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). Elio also includes references the Drake Equation – a formula used to estimate the number of detectable, communicative extraterrestrial civilisations in the Milky Way – that appears on the t-shirt of radio expert and military contractor Captain Gunther Melmac (Brendan Hunt).
Melmac is an eccentric, greasy comedy character who reinforces the pale male nerd stereotype of science that was frankly at odds with the inclusionary tone set by the rest of the movie. But I enjoyed the ham radio element and the idea that amateur scientists were not only part of the search for ETI but also saving Elio and his aunt as they navigated the debris field leaving Earth’s orbit. Elio’s Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña, a nice link to communications officer Nyota Uhura) had hopes of becoming an astronaut before her brother and sister-in-law died, leaving her to care for Elio; she prioritises Elio over her career and works for astromaterials research tracking space debris for the military. Olga and Elio use an alien spaceship to return to the Communiverse with ham radio enthusiast and scientist Melmac’s help, the film shows a version of LEO (Lower Earth Orbit visualisation) a real-time website that tracks space junk. Elio presents a range of approaches to seeing and searching space from the Earth’s cluttered debris fields that threaten operating satellites and orbiting infrastructure to amateur radio technologies and emerging research into potential signals of ETI beyond the radio realm to imagining future technologies and lifeforms that may change the way we understand everything.
One of my favourite imagined future technologies comes in the form of Ooooo (Shirley Henderson), a liquid supercomputer. ‘She’ was the first alien creature to be designed as part of Elio and, as explained by VFX supervisor Claudia Chung Sanii:
“Ooooo is Pixar’s first topology-free character rig. 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. 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!”
So instead of being modelled with a skeleton/rig (a hierarchy of bones or joints) that is then attached to a 3D model’s surface (the mesh), Ooooo is flexible, like the clay used to literally sculpt early CG characters. Using 1980s technology metaballs (blobby models) – first developed by Jim Blinn to animate atom interactions for Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV series Cosmos – and recent advances in digital animation the character has been given “unprecedented flexibility” and speed. As animators “push and pull [Ooooo] into shapes, the [rig] automatically paints itself into a translucent sculpture complete with internal pulsing circuitry” (Chung Sanii, Elio production notes). As both a character and an innovation in animation Ooooo can rapidly become anything as needed, she is not defined by a single shape or form, she is a collective of blobby shapes that form and reform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TOrCam6jAQ
The collection of alien species imagined here are not humanoid (bipedal) but a range of intentionally abstract forms. There are silicon-based rock creatures whose markings resemble macrophotographs of sand grains – thus, purposefully connecting the human and alien worlds by playing with scale. Microbiology also inspired the villains of the movie – the Hylurgians – who are purple-skinned, big teethed eyeless tardigrade-like aliens that have adapted to survive extreme environments but dominate them by wearing artificial exoskeletons. They are inspired by tardigrades and like them practically indestructible. Research on these near-microscopic animals shows that they can survive freezing temperatures, crushing pressures and even the vacuum of space. Over generations, the hylurgian exoskeletons – that hide their fleshy wormy appearance – have taken on a ritual value and a coming-of-age ceremony sees male hylurgians permanently entombed in the suits; flesh and machine become inseparable.
There is also a psychic cuttlefish, a white furry blob (inspired by paramecium) with a Rorschach test-like face, and a billowing marine flatworm-like creature (Questa, voiced by Jameela Jamil). Much of science fiction media depicts aliens as anthropomorphic bipeds. Unrestricted by the budgetary limitations of special effects, an animation can go beyond this limiting frame and imagine anything and in the development of Elio they have tried to do this. And it on the whole works out visually.
Make space to watch Elio when it comes out on streaming and to buy and give this beautiful and hopeful film a second life. It’s far from perfect (it’s clearly been through too many hands and sanded down and I wish it could have been as Molina had planned), but making an original concept film is currently really hard. Many of the women directors I’ve looked at as part of this project have made original films rather than frnachise movies – or when they have they have suffered from studio interference (see: Tank Girl) – and I worry that a trend towards the safety of the known property will signal a conservative shift towards the traditionally ‘safe hands’ of white male directors when it comes to science fiction too.
The innovation of Elio is three-fold: through its animation, its science focus and its underpinning of diversity. We need more original films like this, not fewer, and more opportunities to explore the outer reaches of science fiction. If we keep remaking the same stories and movies despite our capacity for original ideas, it seems like an awful waste… of space.
“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space”
Elio is Madeline Sharafian’s first feature director credit. Previously she wrote, animated and directed Burrow (2020):
Prior to ElioDomee Shi directed the short film Bao (2018) – the first woman to direct a Pixar short (she won as Oscar) – and the feature film Turning Red (2022) – the first woman to solo direct a Pixar feature:
