Elio (film)


Elio is a 2025 American animated science fiction adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina, and written by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones, from a story developed by Molina, Sharafian, Shi, and Cho, the film stars the voices of Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldaña, Remy Edgerly, Dylan Gilmer, Matthias Schweighöfer, Brandon Moon, Brad Garrett, and Jameela Jamil. It follows an eleven-year-old boy named Elio Solís who is mistaken for the intergalactic ambassador of Earth after being beamed up to the Communiverse by aliens for making contact, and must navigate a crisis that involves the warlord father of an alien he befriended.
Elio was conceived by Molina as a story about childhood and social isolation and was inspired by growing up on a military base and his eventual enrollment at the California Institute of the Arts. The film was officially announced in September 2022, with Molina attached to direct. Molina later left the project to work on Coco 2, and in August 2024, it was announced that Shi and Sharafian would replace him as lead directors. The production team devised a process, titled the "College Project", to create the look of the space setting, the Communiverse. The film was shot with a virtual anamorphic lens and Pixar's new Luna lighting toolset was used to quickly define lighting and the overall aesthetic. Its musical score was composed by Rob Simonsen.
Elio premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, on June 10, 2025, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 20. Although the film received positive reviews from critics, it underperformed at the box office, grossing $154 million worldwide against an estimated budget of $150–200 million. The film has been nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Critics' Choice Movie Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and the Academy Awards, as well as a leading 10 nominations at the 53rd Annie Awards including Best Feature.

Plot

After the death of his parents, young Elio Solís is orphaned and lives with his aunt Olga, an Air Force major who gave up her dreams of becoming an astronaut to raise her nephew. On an outing to a museum, Elio wanders into a closed exhibit on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, where he is awed by the idea of discovering other life in space.
Years later, Elio wishes to be abducted by aliens. Every day, he lies on the beach waiting, but without result. One night, a kid named Bryce and his bully friend Caleb tamper with Elio's ham radio, leading to a fight that injures his left eye. At Olga's workplace, Elio sneaks into an emergency meeting where conspiracy theorist Gunther Melmac claims to have detected an alien response to Voyager, but is dismissed by Olga and her colleagues. Elio uses Melmac's device to send a message, causing a power outage at the military base, nearly costing Olga her job. Olga decides to send him to a youth camp, which he dreads, as Bryce and Caleb are also there.
At camp, Elio escapes from Bryce, Caleb, and other bullies as they attempt to scare him. Back at the military base, Olga receives strange extraterrestrial messages in response to Elio, who is then abducted by an alien ship. Inside the spaceship, Ooooo, a liquid supercomputer, welcomes him to the Communiverse, a place where aliens from different worlds share their knowledge. Other ambassadors mistakenly declare him a candidate for ambassador, thinking he is the leader of Earth and that he created the Voyager spacecraft. Before Elio can clarify, Lord Grigon, a warlord previously rejected by the Communiverse, arrives to take the Communiverse by force. The ambassadors plan to return Elio to Earth while they resolve the crisis, but Elio volunteers to negotiate with Grigon in return for induction as an ambassador. Ooooo creates a clone of Elio to take his place back on Earth. Olga brings Other Elio home from camp after hearing about the fight.
Meanwhile, Elio attempts to negotiate with Grigon, but is imprisoned after unintentionally angering him. While trying to escape, he encounters Grigon's son, Glordon, and decides to use him as a bargaining chip to convince Grigon to leave the Communiverse alone. They head back to the Communiverse, where Elio gives Glordon a disc that regulates his body temperature. Grigon agrees to leave them in peace in exchange for Glordon's safe return.
Elio and Glordon confide in each other; Elio is lonely and feels misunderstood by his aunt, while Glordon resists becoming a war machine like his father. Elio devises a plan to keep them together; he hides the real Glordon in an escape shuttle while giving a clone to Grigon, but Grigon quickly realizes the deception. He compels the mind-reading Ambassador Questa to extract Glordon's location from Elio and sends troops to retrieve his son. Questa, realizing Elio is a regular kid, returns him to Earth. Meanwhile, Glordon accidentally activates the shuttle, heading toward Earth.
Back home, Elio is devastated but soon spots his aunt on the beach looking for him with Other Elio, whom she had already suspected was not her real nephew. After reconciling, they head to the military base, where Glordon's shuttle has been captured. Other Elio sacrifices himself to distract the military, while Elio and Olga sneak into the base to rescue Glordon, who is now suffering from hypothermia after his disc broke upon landing. They pilot the shuttle back to the Communiverse, calling Bryce, Melmac, and worldwide ham radio enthusiasts for help traveling through a debris field.
Reaching the Communiverse, they return Glordon to Grigon, who rips his warsuit open to swaddle him, saving his life, and apologizes to his son and the ambassadors. Elio is welcomed back into the Communiverse, but declines the offer, deciding that Earth is his home, and bids his friends farewell before returning to Earth with Olga.

Voice cast

  • Yonas Kibreab as:
  • * Elio Solís, an eleven-year-old boy who is mistakenly identified by the aliens as Earth's ambassador
  • * Other Elio, a clone of Elio. Kibreab suggested recording both versions of the character simultaneously "without a break".
  • Zoe Saldaña as Olga Solís, Elio's aunt who is an Air Force major. She was originally written as Elio's mother and set to be voiced by America Ferrera. However, because the directors wanted to "deepen Elio's motivation for wanting to be abducted by aliens", the character was rewritten with Ferrera leaving the project due to scheduling conflicts in August 2024. Sharafian stated that "it felt like a relationship with a mother and son was a bit too much."
  • Remy Edgerly as Glordon, a worm-like alien whom Elio befriends. His design was influenced by studies of larval insects and microbiotic creatures, including the tardigrade. Animation supervisor Jude Brownbill described Glordon as "sort of mysterious, creepy, off-putting, a work with a bunch of teeth".
  • * Edgerly also voices Other Glordon, a clone of Glordon
  • Brandon Moon as Helix, an alien ambassador from the planet Falluvinum
  • Brad Garrett as Lord Grigon, a bulky, worm-like alien warlord and ambassador in high-tech armor from the planet Hylurg who is Glordon's father
  • Jameela Jamil as Questa, a radiodonta-like alien ambassador from the planet Gom
  • Dylan Gilmer as Bryce, a boy who shares the same fascination in aliens as Elio
  • Jake Getman as Caleb, Bryce's friend who bullies Elio
  • Matthias Schweighöfer as Tegmen, an alien ambassador from the planet Tegmen Schweighöfer also voiced Tegmen in the film's German dub.
  • Ana de la Reguera as Turais, an alien ambassador from the planet Com'acon
  • Atsuko Okatsuka as Naos, an alien ambassador from an unknown planet who mastered the translations of the other alien races
  • Shirley Henderson as Ooooo, a blue gelatinous liquid supercomputer. Described as "a Swiss Army knife made of droplets", animation supervisor Travis Hathaway stated that "she can become a screen, she can become a vinyl player, she can become a projector, she can manifest as a pen for Elio to write with".
  • Brendan Hunt as Gunther Melmac, an Air Force analyst who is a conspiracy theorist. Melmac is the fictive home planet of ALF.
  • Naomi Watanabe as Auva, an alien ambassador from the planet Knack a' Knack. Watanabe also voiced Auva in the film's Japanese dub.
  • Anissa Borrego as Mira, an alien ambassador from the planet Drump
  • Shelby Young as the Diplo Ship
  • Bob Peterson as the Universal Users Manual
  • Kate Mulgrew as the narrator of the Voyager 1 Museum Exhibit; Mulgrew previously portrayed Kathryn Janeway, captain of the fictional future starship USS Voyager, in the Star Trek franchise.
  • Tamara Tunie as Colonel Markwell
Archival recordings of Carl Sagan are also used.

Production

Development

In September 2022, during the D23 Expo, Pixar Animation Studios announced a new original film titled Elio, with Adrian Molina set to direct and Mary Alice Drumm set to produce. It would have marked Molina's feature-length solo directorial debut after having co-directed and co-written Coco. Molina and Drumm talked about the film and posed the question, "What if I told you we're not alone in the universe, and everything you've ever heard about aliens is true?" Shortly after the announcement, there was a planned screen glitch delivering a message with alien text saying, "Bring us to your leader."
The film was conceived by Molina as a "personal coming-of-age story about youthful alienation." Molina was inspired by his childhood growing up at a military base and eventual enrollment at the California Institute of the Arts when developing the film's story. Director Madeline Sharafian described his feelings on the private art school by saying "he felt like he'd found his people there, he'd found his world". After working on the project for a couple of years, Molina felt like he "ultimately wasn't the one to see it to the finish line," exiting the film in order to work on Coco 2.
In June 2024, Pixar's chief creative officer Pete Docter revealed that Turning Red director Domee Shi was working on the film. She was officially announced as the new director at the D23 fan event in August 2024, alongside Madeline Sharafian, who previously worked on storyboarding the film. The screenplay was written by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones; Cho previously co-wrote Turning Red, while Jones previously co-wrote Pixar's Soul and Luca. During production, when researching the topic of loneliness, the directors talked to psychologists, including Vivek Murthy, about children's loneliness and grief. Sharafian said that "everybody's feeling it, and as we were learning more about it as a crew, we started to realize, we're like, 'Wait a minute. I'm really lonely right now'."
In June 2025, multiple insiders, who worked at Pixar, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the film. They noted that characterizations of Elio as a "queer-coded character" were removed as the film moved through the production process, with a push by Pixar executives to make Elio "more masculine," removing examples of his love of fashion and environmentalism, including after Adrian Molina departed the film as director, replaced by Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi. Some expressed disappointment at the first-cut of the movie shared by Sharafian and Shi, with one employee stating that the changes "destroyed this beautiful work" while another described the final version of Elio as "much more generic" as compared to previous versions. Reports that some employees left after Molina departed were disputed by another Pixar source. One former artist told the publication that executives were "constantly sanding down" moments which alluded to Elio's queer sexuality, engaging in "obeying-in-advance behavior" and that changes to the film made it about "totally nothing," describing the film's production as "something of a cautionary tale" to them, wondering if the "rewrite was worth it." The same source claimed that America Ferrera, who left the film's cast after Molina's departure, was "upset that there was no longer Latinx representation in the leadership" of the film.