Pixar’s Newest Kid Adventure Gets Intergalactic in ‘Elio’ Trailer

As Disney and Pixar prep for the release of Elemental, they are already starting to launch the marketing for their next film, Elio. And now, the studio has released a brand new trailer teasing an all-new and original story that follows a young boy who heads off into space and meets aliens. The only thing is that the aliens believe the kid to be “uuhh-Earth’s” ambassador. As you can imagine, this has the potential to be hilarious but also very problematic.

We were able to get a small sneak peek of the film during the Pixar presentation at D23. That’s when Adrian Molina (director of Coco) spoke about how the title character (Yonas Kibreab) is a human who has trouble fitting in with everyone else. With his mother (America Ferrera) busy working on a top-secret mission at a military base, Elio has no one else to talk to. That is until he is abducted by aliens who mistake him for the leader of Earth. Now the fate of an entire planet rests in the hands of a kid full of self-doubt and no confidence. But his quest to prove that being yourself is the best thing about being human is the key to saving humanity, even when everything around him seems alien.

According to Molina, the film’s setting of the Communiverse “is a sparkling space city filled with all sorts of alien architecture. This is outer space like no one has ever seen before, and it’s filled with creatures of all shapes and sizes.” So it’s not too far off what we saw in Wall•E, but it is now populated with aliens that have space-age designs.

Joining Ferrera and Kibeab are Jameela Jamil and Brad Garrett, both of whom play alien ambassadors of their respective planets. Elio hits theaters on March 1, 2024.

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

For centuries, people have called out to the universe looking for answers—in Disney and Pixar’s all-new movie “Elio,” the universe calls back! The original feature film introduces Elio, an underdog with an active imagination who finds himself inadvertently beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary organization with representatives from galaxies far and wide. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s ambassador to the rest of the universe, and completely unprepared for that kind of pressure, Elio must form new bonds with eccentric alien lifeforms, survive a series of formidable trials and somehow discover who he is truly meant to be.