- “There's five hundred million habitable planets out there, and one of them's gotta want me!”
- ―Elio
Elio Solis is the titular protagonist of Disney•Pixar's 2025 animated feature film Elio. He is an 11-year-old boy, who wished to get abducted by aliens across the galaxy and is mistaken for the intergalactic ambassador of planet Earth. He goes on adventures around the Communiverse.
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Background[]
Official Description[]
- Elio is an 11-year-old who doesn't feel like he fits in on Earth. He loves his Aunt Olga, and he knows she loves him, too, but she doesn't really get him. "Elio's parents passed away when he was younger," says producer Mary Alice Drumm. "He's lonely. He sees this magnificence in space—the promise of life—and he puts all his energy into that. He really believes that's where he'll find true connection."
Personality[]
In the beginning, Elio starts off as a depressed and lonely boy, deeply affected by his parents' deaths. When he developed a fascination with aliens and outer space, Elio used these interests to escape from reality and his grief over his parents' death. His interest in aliens and grief also caused him to isolate himself from his aunt Olga and anyone who tried to befriend him as he felt nobody would understand and accept him like his parents did before they died. And because of this belief, Elio selfishly did not consider Olga his family, thinking she only saw him as a burden and that if he were meet aliens of different species, they would accept him for his weirdness and nonconformity unlike anyone on Earth.
Elio is rambunctious with his powerful passion for space, or more specifically, extraterrestrial life. He is prone to hyperactive habits to pursue this passion. Beneath his enthusiasm and energy, Elio is a boy with insecurities and fears of being rejected and unloved. Though Elio has shown signs of being self-centered, he is ultimately a kind-hearted child that desperately wants to connect with people.
When abducted by aliens, Elio was overjoyed to meet real aliens and was fascinated with their lifestyle in the Communiverse. However, upon realizing the aliens mistook him as an ambassador for Earth, Elio was shocked and instead of correcting the misunderstanding, Elio embraced the role, out of a desire to be seen as someone important. As a result, Elio went through so many lengths to keep his facade as he desired to stay in the Communiverse where he negotiated with Lord Grigon that ended in poor results, pretended to kidnap his son, and attempted to replace him with a clone in order to spare him from disappointing his father. However, when Elio's lies were exposed by Ambassador Questa after she forcefully read his mind, he tried to explain himself and it was only after he saw the Communiverse get attacked and was pushed through a portal to Earth that caused Elio to realize how his lies and determination for acceptance had caused a lot of harm to others.
When meeting Glordon, Elio formed a bond with the young alien, something he thought he was incapable of doing with anyone on Earth. During their time together, Elio and Glordon found kindred spirits in each other due to their statuses as outcasts and having complicated relationships with their parental guardians. Through his friendship with Glordon and during his time in the Communiverse, Elio became a selfless, social, and open-hearted individual where he was able to express his feelings and relate to Olga and Bryce who had tried to befriend him earlier. Upon seeing Olga working to send a message to the aliens for his return, Elio managed to reconcile with his aunt after she expressed her love for him and how despite giving up her dreams when his parents died, she still wanted him no matter what.
Once he discovered Glordon to be on the verge of dying after crashing on Earth and his body not being used to cold temperatures, Elio was willing to risk his life to save his friend. After Glordon was revived by Grigon, Elio encouraged his friend to reveal his desire to not become a war machine, allowing Glordon to reconcile with his father. Because of Elio's heroism, he was an awarded a membership in the Communiverse, making Elio overjoyed. However, upon seeing Olga looking heartbroken, Elio realized the importance of family and how deep his bond with his aunt is. This caused Elio to maturely turn down the title of an ambassador, recognizing that he still had a lot of growing up to do and had to give Earth and other people in general a chance so he can embrace the possibility of building a fulfilling life and forming strong relationships at home.
As a result, Elio is able to move on from his parents' deaths, strengthen his bond with Olga, become friends with Bryce, and keep his friendship with Glordon by remaining in contact with him.
Physical appearance[]
Elio is a short, pre-teen boy with lightly tanned skin, brown eyes, dark brown wavy hair, and light freckles across his nose and cheeks. Through out most of the first act he wears a light green t-shirt with a green alien head on it, dark green shorts, a green bracelet, white socks with a green line, and dark blue shoes with white laces and brown soles.
He additionally wears a modified metal colander as a helmet and a large violet cape with decorations (such as colorful plastic spoons, forks, and knives) and green on the back of the cape.
For the majority of the film he wears one blue eye patch on his left eye after being hit with a radio during the fight with his bullies until the end of the movie. He also has a mole in the shape of the Orion Nebula on his stomach.[1]
For his camp outfit, Elio wears a scouts uniform consisting of a short-sleeve button up dark blue short polo shirt, gray cargo shorts, dark green socks, black shoes with brown soles on them, and a tan sash.
The outfit Elio wears for the majority of the film, which he created himself using nanotech, is a dark green V-neck t-shirt with a light blue undershirt, dark green shorts, dark green boots with yellow, white, and black patterning, a tan sash, and a light green cape with silver and gold star patterns.
Powers and Abilities[]
Powers[]
- Commundisc Capabilities: With the Commundisc, he can alter his own gravity, internally translate any language programmed into the disc, and even regulate his body temperature.
- Internal Language Translation: Whenever hearing languages that were programmed into the Commundisc, Elio will immediately become aware of whatever is being told to him after it's translated into English.
- Self-Temperature Control: Elio, with the Commundisc, can control his own bodily temperature, which he can regulate to keep him perfectly balanced between hot and cold.
- Self-Gravity Manipulation: Elio, using the Commundisc, can control his own gravitational field, allowing him to increase and decrease the amount of gravity he has in an environment or at a time.
Abilities[]
- Intelligence: Elio, though lacking inherent superhuman powers, possesses a brilliant mind. He is able to effectively deceive the entire Communiverse for a period of multiple days, only being revealed because he didn't account for Questa's telepathy. He also very quickly comes up with the plan of replacing Glordon with a clone, which only fails due to factors he couldn't reasonably be expected to predict.
Role in the film[]
Elio is first seen sitting under a table at a restaurant with his aunt persistently suggesting meals for him to choose with no luck. Olga is then spotted by another woman who asks Olga what she is doing at the restaurant. After overhearing them about an astronaut program, Elio decides to try out for it and wanders away into a dark room. He spots a gold disk labeled "VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORD," and approaches it. He then presses the circular gold button for the "O" in "VOYAGER" which plays a recording explaining a mission to travel to the cosmos and beyond.
A worried Olga comes running into the room and finds Elio lying down on the ground. Elio asks his aunt if life is really out there pointing at a hologram of the solar system. Olga then tells her nephew he can't run away from her like that. They leave the room as Elio looks back at the replica of Voyager hanging above him.
Elio draws a diagram that reads "ALIENS! ABDUCT ME!!" in the sand on a beach and tries really hard to get attention from outer space for several days, paying no thought to anything else. One night, he's woken up by a light that scares a hermit crab off his face. the light turns out to be a slender boy called Bryce who offers to join Elio's ham radio club and offers his ham radio to Elio who takes it and pairs it with his and tells Bryce he can go, much to his confusion. Bryce's friend Caleb then shows up and questions Elio about his hat. Elio attempts to scare Bryce and Caleb away, but is offended by Bryce for telling Caleb that he's the kid whose parents died and states this as classified information. When a sound come from Elio's ham radio, he and Caleb fight over it and break it with the former getting hit in the left eye. He then jumps up on Caleb and strangles him. This fight ends with unpleased policy finding Caleb, Elio and Bryce on the beach. Elio and the bullies are later sent back to their families.
Elio next appears sucking on a lollipop and with an eye patch over his left eye and being dragged by the left arm by his Olga who asks him if she has to put a tracker on him as he sees the two bullies from the beach giving him an unfriendly look. After explaining to Elio that his eye will be fine if he doesn't touch it for 2 weeks, Olga asks Elio for a truthful explanation of what he was thinking. Olga's peer pass by and tell her if she's going to seminar tonight. She declines this and takes Elio into her office. She shows him faces that represent feelings asks him which one of them is him. Elio states to Olga that the overwhelmed face is her. She takes a deep breath and tells Elio to sit in by her desk and be safe for 10 minutes. As soon as Olga leaves, Elio hears two of her crew members talk about an emergency meeting and catches a glimpse of them heading in the room for it. As they open the door, Elio props it open for himself, sneaks into the room and hides into a garbage can. Inside, he finds Olga's coworker Gunther Melmac talking with her about receiving a signal from space (which Elio recognizes from before) and that he has set up everything to send a message back. Elio is rather excited by this. Unfortunately, Olga dismisses Melmac and has him escorted out of the room, reminding her team that they're orbital analysts, that they track space debris, not rogue UFO signals. As soon as everyone leaves, he heads over to the desk and transmits a message saying that he's excited to join them and asks any alien being listening to come and get him. As a result, the message transmitted shuts down all power to the base.
Elio heads home excitedly with his aunt who is on the phone with her boss, gathering items for the arrival of aliens. After Olga finishes her call, she is frustrated with him, saying that aliens aren't coming for him. He tries to interject, but is told that his actions nearly cost Olga her job. She hands him a pamphlet for Camp Carver. He is disappointed that he thinks Olga is sending him to boarding school, despite her trying to cover it up as a sleepaway camp. When Olga tries telling him that he needs to make friends, he states that he needs to meet aliens, because he believes they want him more than her. She tells him that she does want him and that they're family. He angrily tells that Olga isn't her family and turns his back on her. Shocked by what he said, she leaves his room before telling Elio that his life is on Earth. As she leaves, he frustratedly slams his door and jumps onto his bed. He looks at a picture of him along with his parents in happier times. He then opens his bedroom door to hear his aunt conversing with a friend on the phone. He overhears her and hears her say that her life isn't what it turned out to be. This leads him to believe that Olga doesn't want him. He goes up to the roof looking up at the stars, with tears in his eyes, hoping for someone to get him.
The next morning, Elio is driven to Camp Carver by Olga where we look sulkily out the window at the camp grounds which make Olga worried. Elio is terrified of the sight the camp's football playing. Olga tells him that she went to the same camp as a kid and the camp will be good for him. Elio then turn his back on Olga. As soon as Olga leaves him to have a word with counselor Truman, from behind Elio, appear Bryce and Caleb the latter of who tells him that they got in so much trouble because of him. Caleb then pushes him to the ground and they walk off.
At rainy night, Elio is on a tent trying to call aliens, but no sign of them, he then takes his space colender from his head. Just then, Bryce prepares alien masks to Caleb, Trish and a male camper to scare him instead of hurting him, but Caleb wants to be funny. As they open the tent, they see that Elio disappeared and ran to the beach, and they finally caught him up. But as Caleb prepares to beat Elio up, a wave appears coming until his whole world freezes suddenly, and a UFO appears from the wave and beams Elio up, where his dream has finally came true.
Elio is seen yelling for joy in a ride and then finds himself floating in some box. Ooooo appears and scans him so he can understand her, adjusts his gravity and offers him a welcome glass of glorp. Elio doesn't have time to take a sip before Ooooo take him with her to the Communiverse.
There, Ooooo takes Elio on a tour through the Communiverse where he meets Ambassador Helix, Ambassador Questa and Ambassador Tegmen, until they stop by a pod where he meets several other alien ambassadors after Lord Grigon tore through a hole of the pod. The ambassadors then think whether Elio can stay in the Communiverse much to his excitement.
Later, Ooooo creates a clone for Elio by creating with a clay, forming him with his scout outfit and they both see they are totally identical. Ooooo then opens a portal to Earth while the entire world is still frozen, as Other Elio goes into the position where the Real Elio is, and the scene resumes when Caleb beats him up.
Elio tells the ambassaadors that he knew they were looking for him. Confirming this, Helix shows him a spacecraft he says that they found in an asteroid field. Elio recognizes it as Voyager.
Trivia[]
- Elio Solis was originally intended to be a queer-coded character who did not adhere to stereotypical ideas of masculinity, along with a passion for fashion and environmentalism, as well as Elio having a picture of a boy in his room, suggesting a gay crush. One early cut sequence had Elio collect trash on a beach and turn it into apparel for a "trash-ion show," including a pink tank top. This would have made Elio the second Disney male gay protagonist of a film, following Ethan Clade.
- This referenced the original director Adrian Molina (Coco), who is gay. Molina screened a cut of the film for Pixar but it was rejected by the company, with Molina eventually leaving the project due to being disappointed with the erasure of its queer themes. Elio was retooled by its now co-directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi.[2]
- Former Pixar assistant editor Sarah Ligatich mentioned that she was disappointed by the changes and noted a lot of people were unhappy and left the Elio project, after Pixar kept "sanding down" any moments alluding to Elio not being heterosexual. One anonymous Pixar developer mentioned, "Suddenly, you remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity and Elio just becomes about totally nothing. The Elio that is in theaters right now is far worse than Adrian's best version of the original. [The character] Elio was just so cute and so much fun and had so much personality, and now he feels much more generic to me".[3]
- Something similar happened with Inside Out 2: after her growth spurt, Riley Andersen is shown to be more open to going out with boys. Originally, she was shown going out with girls as well, showing her to be bisexual. However, the higher-ups at Pixar, convinced that Lightyear bombed because of Alisha Hawthorne being lesbian, forced it to remove any aspects of bisexuality, leaving Riley as heterosexual.
- Elio is Pixar's sixth titular character, after Nemo, WALL-E, Dory, Coco and Luca.
- He is also the fourth titular character to be a protagonist, the first three being WALL-E, Dory, and Luca.
- Likewise, Elio is also the fourth titular character to just have the name on the title of a Pixar movie, after WALL-E, Coco, and Luca.
- His phone case is based on the bunny from the SparkShorts film Burrow, making it the second Pixar film to cameo this, after Turning Red.
- His name, Elio, and his surname, Solis, could based to the words "Helios" and "Sol", which in Greek and Latin mean "Sun", so his complete name in English is, literally, "Sun Sun".
- His outfit worn during his internship in the youth camp has some resemblance to that one worn by Ercole Visconti, Luca's main antagonist.
- Elio is similar to Lilo Pelekai from Lilo & Stitch; they both lost their parents and a relative takes care of them. They both feel out of place and are able to find friends from outer space.
- He is also similar to Luz Noceda from The Owl House; though Luz lost her father and Elio lost both his parents, they both feel out of place due to their eccentricities. They both found themselves beyond the limits of Earth and a doppelganger takes their place.
- He is also similar to Hiro Hamada and Tadashi Hamada from Big Hero 6; they both lost their parents at a young age and live with their aunts.
- Some Pixar Balls can be seen in his underwear when Ooooo was scanning him.
- He has a Luxo, Sr. lamp and a X-99 rocket from Ducky and Bunny's carnival stand in his bedroom.
- When Elio has his eye patch throughout the film, it references Nick Fury's appearance from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
- Elio is of Hispanic-American origin.
Gallery[]
Promotional[]
Renders[]
.png "Elio Solis (Pixar).png (125 KB)")
Stock art[]
Concept art[]
Screenshots[]
.jpg "Elio still (1).jpg (1.39 MB)")
Miscellaneous[]
.jpeg "Elio - How to BeFriend an Alien (and Other Life-Forms).jpeg (311 KB)")
-(2025).png "FunkoPOP-Movies-1532-Elio-With-Ooooo-(GlowInTheDark)-(2025).png (1.57 MB)")
References[]
- ↑ Pixar (November 21, 2024). "Elio | Teaser Trailer". YouTube.
- ↑ Tuttle, Brit (July 2, 2025). ""'Elio' Just Becomes About Totally Nothing – Former Pixar Staffers Speak Out on Erasure of Queer Themes and Production Woes In New Animated Film". WDW News Today.
- ↑ Gajewski, Ryan (June 30, 2025). "Inside 'Elio's' "Catastrophic" Path: America Ferrera's Exit, Director Change and Erasure of Queer Themes". The Hollywood Reporter.
External links[]
Elio Solis on Pixar WikiElio Solis on the Elio Wiki
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