June 20, 2025

— On July 21, 2023, NASA's Voyager 2 interstellar probe stopped communicating with Earth.

Although the spacecraft was more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) away, the event hit close to home for the Disney-Pixar team working on the movie "Elio," which is out today (June 20) in theaters.

Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, were launched 16 days apart in 1977 to explore the outer planets of our solar system. Sent out on different trajectories, Voyager 2 began its extended mission exploring interstellar space in 2018, six years after Voyager 1 became the first human-made spacecraft to travel beyond the influence of the Sun.

Both spacecraft have mounted on it a "Golden Record," a phonograph with both sounds and data intended to convey information about humanity and its culture to any extraterrestrial society that encounters a Voyager probe in the future.

Although the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had a good idea as to why Voyager had gone silent, they would not know for sure until Aug. 4, 2023, when, after receiving instructions to reorient itself, the probe again began transmitting data back to Earth.

Or did it?

"Elio" special look. Click to enlarge video in new pop-up window. (Disney-Pixar)

Spoiler warning! The following contains details regarding the plot of the Disney-Pixar animated film "Elio."

In "Elio," the titular character is a young boy who feels all alone on this world. Learning about the Golden Record during a visit to a local air and space museum, Elio becomes obsessed with making contact with aliens, just as the "Communiverse," an organization of interplanetary civilizations, comes across one of the Voyager probes.

Through a twist of fate and a series of events, Elio ends up in the right place at the right time to hijack Earth's reply to the Communiverse's attempt to make contact. His message leads to him being abducted and sets forth the events of the movie.

In "Elio," Voyager serves both as a plot device and a metaphor for Elio's search to find where he fits on Earth and in the universe.

"It just sort of speaks to what we do to a great degree," Nick Porcino, a senior software engineer at Pixar who consulted with the animators on orbital computation and navigation, said in an interview with collectSPACE. "How many kids today know about the Golden Record of Voyager and what that represents? Some do, but why not keep that in our our consciousness, right?"

When Voyager first appears on screen, it is done so in a way that looks and feels more like a documentary than an animated kids' movie about aliens.

"It appears very, very real," said Porcino. "It doesn't switch into the fantastical until later in the sequence, so I think kids will figure out that they are learning about something that is real."

To achieve that reality, the filmmakers turned to different references. Pixar's art department studied photographs and located a detailed 3D online model, while the sets division modeled the probe from scratch using a lot of the diagrams and photos they found on NASA's website.

The animators' attention to detail was so great that of all the shots that make up "Elio" the one that took the most time to render was Voyager flying through space at the start of the film. That one scene took 152,185 CPU hours or the equivalent of 4.25 years on a "standard" four-core computer.

Beyond the probe itself, the filmmakers also strove to accurately represent the Golden Record and its contents. Images and sounds from the disk are played back for Elio and others a number of times throughout the movie.

"For the audio, all but one of the voices is actual audio from the real Golden Record. We re-recorded the Canadian voice for clearance/rights reasons, but everything else is real," a Pixar spokesperson told collectSPACE. "For the images, the Golden Record cover art — as visible on display in the movie's air and space museum, and on the Voyager itself — is accurate to the real disk."

Actual images from the Golden Record were used during a scene in the control room where Elio's aunt, Air Force Major Olga Solis works, although they are purposely made to be "chunky" given the way the Communiverse makes contact. There are also images shown to Elio after he has been abducted, but those are not authentic.

"The images used when [the liquid supercomputer] Ooooo is projecting the disk for Elio in the Communiverse are not from the record, but they are based on the kinds of graphic images that we could not clear," said the Pixar spokesperson.

One of the images is of "Tom the Lizard," a character from Pixar's next film, "Hoppers." Meant as an "easter egg" (or hidden reference), Tom's inclusion was inspired by a real photo included on the Golden Record.

Beyond Voyager, most of what appears in "Elio" is solidly in the sci-fi and fantasy categories, though producer Mary Alice Drumm met with Jill Tarter, one of the founding members of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, early on in the film's development.

"She taught us to think about space in a more expansive way that in turn made us feel more connected here. We're all Earthlings. There's a strong theme of connection in this story that really resonated with all of us," said Drumm in a statement released by Disney-Pixar.

The film's writers also consulted with former NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio.

"There are some scenes where they're traveling through space and they're dodging some orbital debris, and so I was helping them with some of the terminology with regards to navigation versus attitude, and providing them with some of technical terms that we use in spaceflight, guidance and navigation when you're controlling a spacecraft," said Mastracchio, a veteran of more than 227 days in space on four missions, in an interview with collectSPACE.

"They also asked me to look at some of the early drawings of the exterior of a spacecraft, and maybe some of the interior shots, if I remember as well, and I was just giving them some really basic advice. They had already a lot of this down very well. It was very well done," he said.

There is still one detail, though, that was left unanswered in "Elio." The film does not make clear which of the two Voyager probes is found by the Communiverse.

In the movie, "Voyager passes by Jupiter and Saturn and eventually reaches the Kuiper Belt before being 'abducted.' We wanted to keep it ambiguous, since based on our research, both Voyagers would've passed these planets and reached the belt."

"In 2023, when we were still developing 'Elio,' we heard that NASA lost contact with Voyager 2 and internally would joke that that was our Voyager and that it had been abducted," Pixar's spokesperson told collectSPACE.

"Since then, NASA has regained communication with Voyager 2, but is it possible that it's actually communicating from the Communiverse?" the rep said. "Maybe."