'Elio': Toronto Oscar winner Domee Shi explains why title character has an eye patch

Oscar winner Domee Shi drew inspiration from her own mother for her 2018 animated short film Bao, crafted a love letter to Toronto with one of the best fictional boy bands with Turning Red in 2022, and now takes on sci-fi with the movie Elio (currently in theatres). For Shi, it was exciting to get to play with the genre as one of the film's directors.
"This was my first time directing a sci-fi movie, but I've always loved sci-fi as a genre. Some of my favourite movies are sci-fi movies, like Alien, Gravity," Shi told Yahoo Canada in Toronto. "It was so great to be able to pay homage to all of my favourite movies."
"I love that in our movie we can use space as a symbol of aspiration, of wish fulfillment, instead of a scary space or a threatening space. It's a space that welcomes and accepts our main character."
Unlike what we see in most movies, the main character Elio Solis (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) wants to be abducted by aliens. As an orphaned child, he lives with his aunt Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña), who works in the military as a major in the U.S. Air Force tasked with scanning for space debris. Olga had dreams of pursing the astronaut space program, but those plans had to be put aside when she became Elio's legal guardian.
Elio is an 11-year-old boy who just doesn't feel like he belongs, which makes him long for a life in space with the aliens.
As we see early on in the movie, as Elio tries to craft a device to communicate with aliens, things don't go as planned and he ends up injuring his eye, requiring him to wear and eye patch until he's healed. The eye patch was something that was quickly embraced by many, even when we didn't know exactly why he was wearing one.
"I love that people have embraced Eliot's eye patch," Shi said. "The original idea came from the original director, Adrian Molina, just this idea that a characteristic that Elio could be othered for is something that he can be celebrated for, that could make him look actually really cool once he's in space."
"Once he is in space and he has the eye patch and the cape, he looks like ... a cool space pirate, but it's so amazing that kids and audiences have embraced that eye patch."
Elio's attempt at alien abduction pays off when he's beamed up to the Communiverse, an organization with representatives from each galaxy, like a sci-fi version of the United Nations, but it's all a misunderstanding. The aliens think that Elio is the leader of Earth. But he doesn't want to go home just yet, so Elio goes along with it and does not tell them he's actually just a kid who loves space.
It's in the Communiverse that Elio leans into what Pixar does best, creating really interesting animated characters, some that are more visually frightening and some that are the most adorable little bundles of joy you've ever seen.
"One of the things I loved about directing a sci-fi movie ... is that you can take these familiar tropes ... and kind of turn them on their head and twist them in a surprising way," Shi said. "So introducing a really scary looking toothy worm with no eyes, you're like, oh my gosh ... is Elio going to be eaten? And then twisting it and being like, oh no, it's actually a really cute kid. It's actually this lonely, weird, cute boy who could be Elio's first friend."
At the heart of Elio is a story of loneliness, a universal theme set to resonate with many who see the movie.
"Me and [co-director Madeline Sharafian], when we started on this project, ... it was our idea to kind of make Elio obsessed with getting abducted by aliens, obsessed with going into space and living with aliens, but we had to understand why," Shi explained. "We had to understand the emotion driving that and we realized it had to be loneliness."
"When Elio gets abducted, when that beam hits him and he's whooping for joy, audiences have to be whooping with him. ... We had to introduce him in a way that made audiences really empathize and understand why he doesn't feel like he belongs on Earth. And that means introducing him as this recently orphaned kid who's thrust upon his aunt who's still struggling with trying to figure out how to balance her career and being a new mom. It's a fine balance too. We don't want to start the movie off in too much of a sad way."
And what's impressive about Elio is that it's able to present its message in a way that can speak to both children and adults. Even Shi admitted that it's a difficult element to achieve.
"It is really hard. It's hard work, but that's kind of the bar that we set for ourselves at Pixar, is to tell these stories that are for kids and for adults," Shi said. "Even when really wacky, goofy, cartoony aliens are on screen and it is a fun, wacky adventure, there is an emotional through line."
"We're really honest with each other. At Pixar, we show our work to each other all the time. These movies take four to five years to make because we're constantly putting up the movie multiple times. We have screenings. We invite members of the crew, members of the studio to watch it, to send in notes. People are very honest, because everyone cares so much about what they do at Pixar and wanting to make stories that resonate with people."

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