Pixar’s Elio created its alien beings not by gazing into telescopes, but by peering into microscopes.
This reversal of the E.T. story follows a lonely Earth boy (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) who ventures far from home after sending a signal into deep space that is received by the Communiverse, a kind of intergalactic United Nations populated by a menagerie of vibrant creatures. Many of the beings Elio encounters actually do exist on Earth—just in teeny-tiny form. Some might be under your fingernails right now. “We were really inspired for the whole world by looking at microphotography,” says production designer Harley Jessup, who won a visual effects Oscar in 1988 for creating the inner workings of Martin Short’s circulatory system in Innerspace.
Decades later, Jessup found himself going small once again to find inspiration for Pixar’s outer space adventure. At this point, audiences have seen basically every iteration of extra-terrestrial, from wispy grays to spiny carnivores and robot invaders. “We were thinking this would help give a feeling of nature that was different from Star Wars aliens, or Star Trek aliens, or Muppets,” Jessup says. “We needed something to hang our hat on.”
That resulted in an array of aliens who were as intriguing as they were unique. “Microscopic bacteria and viruses are very beautiful when you look at them,” Jessup says, walking Vanity Fair through a slideshow of images he and his team of concept artists used as touchstones.
Courtesy of Disney.
Kaleb Rice, a modeler and articulation artist on Elio, said the character design team was “trying to keep them as minimalist and abstract as possible.”
“At first, we were worried about what animation would think about these characters, when many of them don’t have eyes or normal faces or arms,” Jessup added. “But it’s like the Luxo lamp.” That would be the charismatic star of a 1986 short film that Pixar now uses as its logo. “That team can create personality in a rock, basically,” Jessup says.
The makers of Elio literally did that with Ambassador Tegmen (voiced by Army of Thieves’ Matthias Schweighöfer), a teardrop-shaped stone creature. Once again, the infinitesimal served as inspiration, with Tegmen resembling the geometric shapes found in close-up images of sand. “Macro photographs of sand grains are really beautiful. Some of them are like Henry Moore sculptures,” Jessup says. “That scale difference pulls you into an alien world that still is very connected with Earth.”