Elio directors Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian sit down with The Contending to revisit their intergalactic adventure. They share the details of the crafting: not just the animation of the film, but the details of the characters’ motivations and the complexity of their issues. They want to explore how both sides can be right in a fight and how the audience sees the characters evolve across the film. In the highly inventive world of Elio, sometimes evolving means making friends with a squishy alien worm and his warlord father in a big battle suit.
The Contending: Elio’s search for community, especially at the beginning, was interesting when he runs into Bryce who is actually interested in Elio as a friend but Elio is so focused on space he doesn’t even see it. It then culminates in that great sequence when he and Olga are in space and the ham radio enthusiasts including Bryce are all helping them out. Showing that Elio could have had a community on Earth. How did those plot and character beats come about?
Madeline Sharafian: We knew this story would have to change Elio so drastically from hating Earth and not liking any single human to at the very end of the movie justifying this huge decision to leave this utopic Communiverse behind and return to Earth. At the beginning we focused more on his Aunt Olga and thought if that relationship was healed maybe that would be enough for the audience to believe Elio would leave space behind. When we tested it with audiences though many wondered why he didn’t just stay in space. We realized we didn’t give Earth a more holistic overall. We healed one relationship but we needed to heal his entire relationship with Earth. Those scenes with Bryce and the ham radio and then playing off those scenes again was our way of showing that it’s not just one relationship he is going back to, it’s countless people that he hasn’t even met yet. Plus, when we were doing our research, we found that radio waves reach the farthest into space and were our best way of contacting potential life in the universe, but it also has the use of connecting ourselves. And we love that Elio is using it the incorrect way at the beginning of the film, shooting up and out and not across where there are people waiting to communicate with him.
Domee Shi: It was important for us to be able to feel Elio’s change and how he has matured as a character through his time and space. It’s like that saying, to have a village you have to be a villager, and that feels like something Elio is not doing in the beginning. He is lonely, he’s desperate for connection, but I think in his obsession and tunnel vision for finding connection in space he is pushing away and ignoring the potential connection and community around him. I think that’s just a reflection of what we all do. Sometimes when we’re hurt or lonely we put up these walls even though deep down we desperately want someone to punch through that wall and reach out to us. But it’s up to us to bring down those walls and to be a proactive villager, and that is what he learns in space.
The Contending: Speaking of Olga, she felt very realistic of someone trying to be a good parent and trying to connect with Elio. When she takes him to that camp she does think it will help but she is also nervous about doing it. Then the minute she finds out he’s been bullied she goes in there like a mama bear getting her cub back. Did you guys have to do a lot of research into what someone in her situation would be going through?
Domee Shi: We were so lucky in making this movie that we had a lot of female supervisors who were badass moms as well. Mary Alice Drumm, our producer, is also a stepmom who has shared with us countless stories about her just trying to do her best with her kids. It is such a collaborative creative process here where we’re all in the story room sharing our stories of trauma and struggle and hopefully that’s what you see on the screen in the character of Olga. We really wanted people, especially moms or people dealing with her specific situation, to see themselves in her struggle to try to do her best even though she feels like she is failing the whole time. That was something we were balancing the whole time, trying to make Olga understandable and relatable, but also we needed to break Elio’s and her relationship so that he feels compelled to run away.
Madeline Sharafian: What I love about those scenes is that Elio feels abandoned by her when she leaves him at the camp and by the time he’s in space he misses that she would have come to pick him up right away and so the audience is, like, oh I wish he knew! I wish he knew that she was staying up late that night worrying about him. I think we realized that even though the relationship needs to be broken, if you are not rooting for it to come back together in some way the ending wouldn’t be satisfying. Elio is a problem child and is causing a lot of problems for her, and Olga is not used to being a parent and is not sure what to do with him all the time, and may not be as warm as his mother was. They both have good reasons for doing what they were doing and you need to understand both of their perspectives.
Domee Shi: My favorite type of arguments in movies is when I can see both sides of where the characters are coming from. Where I can understand why each of them is feeling the way that they feel and also why they cannot see eye to eye. It was important for us when we approached the relationship between Elio and Olga that it never felt one-sided. We didn’t want too much of Elio feeling like this oppressed neglected kid or too much of Olga feeling like an overwhelmed mom. Hopefully as you watch you just want them to get back together.
The Contending: As animators you now got to be in space and have this gorgeous world to create all these different species of aliens. Were there any particular challenges with that, and did you have a favorite species that you got to play with?
Madeline Sharafian: The challenge for the animators was that their standards for themselves are so high. We would have a lot of sequences with aliens because the whole point of the Communiverse is that it feels like a community and there are all these different aliens that Elio wants to connect with. But that means in a lot of sequences there are aliens in the background that are just sort of there, and they all need to be animated and the animators all want to do a good job. So all the aliens have different rigs and types of movement. A great example is Questa, who is this beautiful floating sea creature but that means she is constantly moving, which is a challenge for the animators. For us it was like when do we give the animators the chance to go full blast and showcase all the movement and when do we need to slow down so it isn’t too distracting so we can focus on Elio. Also figuring out how the animators should focus their time, when is it helpful to just keep this alien in the foreground so you can feel like someone’s there, but you don’t have to spend all this extra time on the movements. It was a lot of communicating with the animators about where they were excited and making sure they could show off but not burn them out.
Domee Shi: When you’re making a movie about space you can pretty much do anything! We can build anything, design any race of aliens, there are no limitations and that is the scary part. But at the end of the day this is a story about a boy who goes out into space and finds community and he forges this emotional friendship with an alien and the audience has to buy that.
But the alien does have to look alien; it can’t just be a bipedal blue guy in a suit, this is animation after all. But we have to care about this alien kid, Glordon, as any human character. I think one of the challenges was showcasing how Elio and Glordon’s relationship can organically develop throughout the movie and bring the audience along. So we shoot very emotional scenes where the boys are airing out what is hurting them and their deepest darkest fears. One of the boys has no eyes and 16 legs, but we still have to be in the moment and empathize with Glordon and feel like these boys are connecting. That is also one of the fun insane challenges of animation: making you feel for an eyeless 5000 pound alien.
The Contending: Glordon’s species, the Hylurgians, are interesting. While they are a warrior race, fear is a big part of them. They are in these big battle suits because they are too weak and squishy otherwise and can be hurt. Glordon’s dad Grigon, while being this big Warrior, is in his own way also looking for a community, and the idea that the Communiverse does not accept him is actually personally hurtful. Which can cause him to be genuinely very violent when rejected. So you have an alien species that has our hero’s best friend in it and the movie’s quasi villain in it as well. With such complexity in this species, how did you go about crafting them?
Madeline Sharafian: I think the way they were designed to begin with was perfect, as you said they have this squishy core which was so delightful. We could go really far with Grigon as this big drama king villain that we could just enjoy, like when he and Elio are shooting those skeets. It’s enjoyable to watch and raises the stakes for Elio as he’s trying to maintain this ruse. We knew we could go so hardcore with it because at the end of the film we would be taking that character out of his carapace and revealing the squishy soft guy that has always been in there. He is driven by pride and fear of humiliation, which can make him feel sympathetic and make you feel like there is more underneath.
Domee Shi: I feel like we designed them in a way that, if you squint, they are kind of like a mirror to Elio and what he is going through. Elio has put up a mental wall around himself while the Hylurgians have literally encased themselves in a carapace suit to hide their true feelings. It made sense dramatically to force Elio to interact and forge a relationship with a character like Grigon who has his own wall, and that through his relationship with Glordon takes down his own metaphorical carapace in order for that species to take down their physical carapaces.
The Contending: Final thoughts?
Domee Shi: Check out the movie on Disney+!
Madeline Sharafian: Turn the volume up! The sound design and the music is really good. Just enjoy it.
Elio streams exclusively on Disney+.
