After years of being curious about Pixar’s latest original film, the Elio release date has arrived, and we can finally talk about the latest 2025 movie in more detail. (Mild spoilers ahead). When I had the chance to visit Pixar Animation Studios for CinemaBlend back in May, I talked to some of the filmmakers about what went into the making of Elio. They told me one element of the movie that especially made them “sweat,” but I thought it turned out to be one of the most gorgeous aspects of the project.
During Pixar’s press event, I learned about the ins and outs of creating the Communiverse, which is a space station that receives Elio’s message and beams him up to consider making him a member under the assumption that he is the leader of Earth. It all started with a sketch made by production designer Harley Jessup who shared what happened after he showed the concept to his fellow filmmakers in our interview:
I didn't know if it would work or not, and God bless Claudia, but we did many tests at the beginning where it wasn't working and we were both worried.
If you’ve seen the new Pixar movie already, which has been getting positive buzz, including through our own Elio review, you know what we’re talking about. When Elio first enters the Communiverse, it’s breathtaking because the space station includes a variety of environments for its diverse alien species to live on and rotates around numerous types of gravities. You can check out the first sketch from Jessup below:
During our visit to Pixar, we learned that the filmmakers ultimately created the environment of the Communiverse in VR, and would spend time placing themselves inside the world to assist them in the animation process. It all sounds very complicated, doesn’t it? As visual effects supervisor Claudia Chung shared:
I mean, he created a place that was sideways, upside down, but part of that is also the charm of space, right? Like there is no gravity in there, and we wanted to respect that. We want our aliens to feel alien. And so, we went straight to the computer and started moving it and building it and modeling. The team did an amazing job at prototyping it. And the design process is very much back and forth.
Pixar has created and risen to the challenge of a lot of technical hurdles over the years, from creating a character that looks as alive as fire for Elemental or conceptualizing new and relatable feelings for last year’s Inside Out 2. But as Chung also explained during our interview, they live for trials like the Communiverse. In her words:
We're usually the ones sweating in the background. They're like, how do we build that? But on Elio it was different. It's like when we saw something beautiful and it made us sweat, it actually was exciting to do something that we've never done before. I think that's what people at Pixar hunger for is the challenge. And Harley was willing to ride along with us even when some of the stuff didn't look great. We didn't give up.
We’ve been waiting for Elio ever since it was announced back in 2022, and now that it’s finally here (and we can finally find out why he has an eyepatch), it’s so interesting to learn about what went into making the movie as visually dazzling as it is.
I thought one of the standout scenes of the whole movie was experiencing the Communiverse for the first time with Elio, and learning that the Pixar filmmakers put a lot of work into making it a reality only makes me appreciate it more.
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