‘Elio’ Animation Supervisors On the Art Of Characters In Motion

Disney / Pixar’s upcoming Elio takes its title character on an emotional journey across the galaxy to find his true purpose. As with all Pixar films, Elio is a dazzling tour-de-force of animation and character development. Plus, it’s a whole lot of fun. 

Here, during a Pixar site visit, The Contending sat down with Elio animation supervisors Jude Brownbill and Travis Hathaway. They provide details on the visual movement of the different aliens and sci-fi wonders that Elio encounters. Plus, they talk about capturing one really energetic little boy!

The Contending: In the clips, seeing the spaceship teleporting Elio was very impressive visually. What were your inspirations there?

Jude Brownbill: The ships were envisioned to look like origami sculptures. Which caused some fun challenges in how to make it look like it was opening, with such a twisted shape.

Travis Hathaway: From our perspective it wasn’t too hard, it was just making it fly down a path. Then all the other departments come in with the shading and bonkers set work. They combine to make something really wild and make you wonder, how did that happen? How did they think to design that?

The Contending: Within the Communiverse there is always something in motion, be it the spheres or the habitats themselves, or some alien or technology. What challenges did that entail?

Travis Hathaway: There was a lot of saved animation that the set department had for taking those huge rings that the aliens lived on, and they had a really long keep-alive cycle that would be shifting stuff in the background. From our perspective it was more about how do we make sure in all this movement that we are looking at Elio? A lot of that is just compositionally, leading the eye to places, or during crowd work we just have to take some of that background down so that we are seeing Elio reacting to things, like when he’s going to the tour of the Communiverse.

The Contending: You have all talked about the different lifeforms that inspired the movement of the different species of aliens. What was the most intriguing for you?

Jude Brownbill: When OOOOO was first described to us as this liquid supercomputer, it sounded scary and that it would be a lot of work to make something look like and behave like water in space. But we had this character artist who said, I know what to do. They came back with the solution being made of metaballs, which is very old technology but very relevant to what we were doing. I do not think we have put it into a character at Pixar or utilized it in the way we’re using it now. OOOOO doesn’t really exist in the computer, she is just math equations, so the hard part was making her appear. That was really impressive to us because we thought it was going to be really complicated but it turned out to be one of the most satisfying things to bring to life.

The Contending: The aliens’ movements have gotten the most talk. Elio’s frenetic energy seemed to be a big part as well. What was he like to create?

Jude Brownbill: We felt putting this energy into his movement, gestures, and making him feel focused in everything he does would really help enhance the fact that he has his mind set on his one goal of being abducted. So some of the animation ideas we stumbled upon were that he would be climbing over everything to get where he was going, because he has that goal and he’s trying to get to it. So speeding up his movements and making him appear frenetic really helped to bring to life his character and feel believable.

The Contending: He should feel kind of distracted so he’ll bump into things if they are in his way and outside of his little cone of vision. Very focused to a fault.

Elio opens nationwide on June 20 in theaters only.