‘People Are Going To See Something They've Never Seen Before': How Pixar's Next Hit Film Was Made
Fans of laughing out loud one moment and crying into your popcorn bucket the next are in for a treat with Pixar's latest release.
Elio is the newest offering from the award-winning animation studio, centring around a lonely boy who becomes obsessed with the idea of being abducted by aliens – and gets more than he bargained for when his dream comes true.
As has come to be expected from the studio that gave us the likes of Inside Out, Coco and Toy Story 3, Elio dives into some pretty hefty themes, exploring everything from loneliness and grief to toxic masculinity, all with Pixar's signature sense of humour and adventure to keep younger viewers as gripped as everyone else in the cinema.
In the lead-up to the film's release, we spoke to directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi about how sci-fi horror had a surprising influence on Elio, creating something people have 'never seen before' with their unique take on space and releasing an original film in the current sea of sequels and live-action remakes at Walt Disney Studios…
Right at the beginning of the film, there's a key scene soundtracked by Talking Heads' Once In A Lifetime. Why was that song chosen, and how easy was it to get?
Madeline Sharafian: That scene and that song were in the film from the beginning that Domee and I started. That montage of Elio going out to the beach every day, desperately trying to be abducted, was almost the way that we explored his character as we changed his motivations to wanting to be abducted by aliens. And I think the song was [Domee's] idea of just a way to showcase that he's stuck in this cycle, and he wants to get out. It was a great idea.
Domee Shi: Yeah, I always loved that song, I always felt like David Byrne kind of gave off alien boy vibes as well. And the way that the song starts always sounded kind of synthy and celestial and spacey in some way. I felt like there was a connection between Byrne and Elio, and it felt like a cool needle drop choice to put in this montage where we're introduced to Elio's obsession with getting abducted, but being unable to, every single day that went by.
MS: It helped a lot that Pete Docter and Jim Morris, our company leadership, really like that song. So I do think that kind of helped us hang onto it and get it for the final, and we're very grateful that we got to keep it. It adds so much to the scene.
DS: There was one moment where we did try another song…
MS: Oh god, yeah…
DS: I was like, 'what about Beastie Boys' Intergalactic?'. And then we tried that for a minute and we were like, 'no, I think we miss Talking Heads', and we went back to that. And also I feel like I haven't really seen [Once In A Lifetime] used a lot in media, in like TV or movies, whereas Intergalactic is used quite a lot. I love that song, though! But yeah…
Something else people are going to pick up on is Elio's eyepatch. It really works as a plot device later in the film, but was that always going to be there, or were other ideas explored?
MS: It was always an eyepatch, I'm pretty sure. I mean, the eyepatch was there in Adrian Molina's original version [Coco writer and director Adrian Molina originally conceived the idea of Elio to helm the film himself, but left the project halfway through to focus on Coco 2, at which point Madeline and Domee took over as lead directors]. When we took the story, we loved [the eyepatch], just as a way that it supports Elio's feeling of otherness, when he's on Earth, he feels even more out of place. And when he goes to space, all of a sudden, he looks like a dashing space sci-fi captain with this cape and his eyepatch, and the aliens love it, it's like '[you have] one eye, [I have] one eye, this is amazing'. All of a sudden it's accepted and loved.
DS: Yeah, it's been great seeing the response to Elio's eyepatch online and with audience members that have come up to us and thanked us for including a kid with an eyepatch – it is something that kids do deal with, and it makes them feel othered. And it sucks!
To have a sci-fi hero in a Pixar movie sporting one and looking cool I think is very empowering.
Let's talk about the look of the film – sci-fi is a huge genre and even within the Disney and Pixar canon, we've been to space a few times. How did you decide what your version of space was going to look like, and what was going to set the Elio universe apart?
MS: Pixar has done two sci-fi movies already [2008's Wall-E and 2022's Lightyear] and Harley Jessup, our production designer, really wanted to shoot for a version that we've never seen. So, he knew that the Communiverse needed to be this sort of beautiful almost Utopia, that there would be aliens from all over the universe gathering there, and almost designed it, one of his very first pieces of production art that I saw that I fell in love with, it was kind of glittering in the sky, almost like a disco ball – the way the lights shimmer on it were like a disco ball. We ended up taking that and putting it in the [finished film], we were like, 'we need to hang onto that'.
So, it's bright, it's colourful, it's also softer and round, which I do think is very different from other sci-fi movies. And everything – even the technology – feels very organic, and kind of squishy and alive, which I think gives it a very unique identity.
DS: Yeah, all of it points to Elio just truly feeling like he belongs there, and that he doesn't want to leave when he first arrives. And I also love that Harley challenged our character designer to design non-humanoid-looking aliens, and kind of look at deep-sea, underwater creatures for reference. We went with designs that you couldn't possibly do with humans in a costume, right?
MS: Yeah, because live-action, especially some of the classics are a little bit limited by that. Like, the alien in Alien is a guy. Really awesome, though, but we were like, 'we're in an animation, we can do whatever we want, so let's make sure that our aliens are taking advantage of what we can do'.
Some parts of the film are quite intense and surprisingly quite scary – especially for a Disney film. Was there much pushback because of that?
DS: I mean, we were excited to explore other aspects of the sci-fi genre that maybe you don't usually see in a Disney and Pixar movie. We're both sci-fi horror fans, and I think there's a good balance between scary and fun – like a fun scary. There's a sweet spot that you can hit, and we tried to do that with all the scenes with Elio's clone, really pushing the clone's friendliness, but also upping the weirdness and the horror surrounding him, from Olga's point of view where she's slowly realising, 'am I living with a clone?'...
MS: …which is a pretty crazy realisation for her! Especially since she starts off the movie as a sceptic of aliens, she doesn't really believe that they're out there, so to take her to becoming a believer… we almost talked about her B-story as in, 'she's in a totally different kind of movie', she is in a pod person movie, and I thought it was fun that we treated her sections almost like a different genre, a little bit.
DS: And you know… we'll fine-tune the execution of it, just to make sure that the music isn't too crazy and the sound effects don't give you too much of a heart attack and we release the tension immediately with a joke or a gag or something. But I don't know – I remember being a kid and loving movies like A Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, where there is like a fun scare. I feel like the original Monsters Inc. taps into that a little bit, too.
Elio is coming out at an interesting time for Walt Disney Studios, where there area lot of films coming up that are either sequels, live-action remakes and other ideas based on existing IP, so it's great to see an original story coming from the studio, too. Is that something that's important to you both as filmmakers?
MS: Yeah!
DS: Definitely.
MS: And it's important to Pixar, too, I think. Even though we release our own sequels [Inside Out 2 was the biggest film of 2024, with follow-ups to Toy Story, Coco and The Incredibles currently in the works at the studio], we do talk a lot about how important originality is to us, just as a filmmaking culture, we have a lot of originals coming [Pixar's next release, Hoppers, is slated for 2026, followed by Gatto in 2027] and I would say, whether they're sequels or originals, we hold ourselves to the same standard for both. And our main goal is just to make incredible movies, and amazing stories. I love originals – but Toy Story 3 is one of my favourite movies that Pixar has ever made! So, as long as we're holding that standard of storytelling, hopefully we can make any kind of movie great. But it is exciting to have an original coming out.
I think we're the only original [Disney film] coming out this summer, which is so wild [the studio also has sequels to Freaky Friday and Tron coming later in 2025, with live-action remakes of Snow White and Lilo & Stitch having also been released earlier in the year, while Marvel projects have included Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts* (which featured a main cast of existing characters) and the new reboot of The Fantastic Four]. I hope people enjoy [Elio] and they're going to see something they've never seen before – and that's really exciting, and worth seeing in a theatre.
Elio is in cinemas now. Watch the trailer for yourself below:
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