WARNING: SPOILERS ahead for Elio.

The main character in Elio listens to several snippets of real-life audio from one of the most important minds in astronomy and planetary science who ever lived. Elio, voiced by Yonas Kibreab, has dreams of venturing to space to meet aliens after finding himself alienated on his home planet of Earth. After a tragic accident makes Elio an orphan, his aunt Olga Solis steps in to take guardianship, but struggles to balance her time between Elio and her space military job. Elio struggles with loneliness and aims to find a new home among the leaders of an intergalactic federation known as the Communiverse.

Elio is the latest movie from Disney and Pixar, who have created classic animated favorites such as Toy Story, The Incredibles, Inside Out, and WALL-E. After releasing in theaters on June 20, 2025, Elio debuted with a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 85% paired with an impressive 90% audience score. It’s one of the few Pixar movies that are true sci-fi films, placing it in the same category as WALL-E, often considered one of the best Pixar movies of all time, and Lightyear, based on the iconic Toy Story character Buzz Lightyear. Because of its sci-fi theme, Elio features the voice recordings of a prolific scientist, Carl Sagan.

Elio Listens To Carl Sagan While Trying To Make Contact With Aliens

Sagan’s Words Echo Elio’s Biggest Themes

Through an archival audio recording, the voice of Carl Sagan is heard several times in Elio. He initially speaks about the significance of Voyager I and how it was, among many things, the first spacecraft that was specifically designed to send out and receive messages from extraterrestrial life. It is also the furthest manmade object ever sent out into space, collecting data on distant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, before entering interstellar space, where it continues to send back data to this day. Sagan thought of the idea of attaching cameras to Voyager I, which took the famous “Pale Blue Dot” pH๏τo of Earth in 1990.

Later, when Elio is sitting on the roof after fighting with Olga, a voice recording of Carl Sagan is also heard. Sagan’s voice comes back at the end of the movie, creating a significant and powerful moment for Elio and Olga, speaking about how the possibility of alien life touches on the deepest of human concerns. In the context of the film, Elio is clearly deeply inspired by Sagan’s inquisitive words about alien life, which is what drives his hopes and pᴀssion to one day become an ambᴀssador of Earth – which is exactly what ends up happening.

How Carl Sagan Connects To Elio’s Story

Elio Draws From Sagan’s Real-Life History

Since Sagan had a hand in the creation of the Voyager 1 probe and the Golden Record, it makes sense that he is featured so prominently in Elio’s initial story. According to NASA, the record consists of 115 imprinted images and various sounds, including “musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.”

The Golden Record symbolizes the first attempt at contact with alien life using various sounds from across human history, which is at the heart of Elio’s story. Furthermore, the record “contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect.” Elio essentially becomes a human version of the Golden Record by making the first recorded contact with extraterrestrial life.

Sagan’s Role In Elio Goes Beyond His Voice & History

He Helped Inspire More Of The Story

Elio co-director Domee Shi, who was also behind 2022’s Turning Red, revealed in an interview with EW that she is a huge sci-fi fan and used Sagan’s most famous fictional works, Contact and Cosmos, as inspiration. “I just love how in Contact, they show aliens in such an aspirational and positive way, and not something really scary that’s coming to get us or coming to replace us.” This approach toward alien life, compared to countless other movies in which aliens are dangerous and pose a threat to humanity, is at the core of Elio and ends the film on a high note.

Source: NASA, EW