Elio (2025)
A Disney original story by Adrian Molina.
After the death of his parents, young Elio Solís is orphaned and lives with his aunt Olga, an Air Force major who gave up her dreams of becoming an astronaut to raise her nephew. On a visit to the Montez Air & Space Museum, Elio wanders into a closed exhibit on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, where he is awed by the idea of discovering other life in space (“Elio”).
Years later, Elio wishes to be abducted by aliens. Every day, he lies on the beach waiting, but without result (“Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads). One night, a kid named Bryce and his bully friend Caleb tamper with his ham radio, leading to a fight that injures his left eye. This forces Elio to wear a patch over his eye for two weeks. At Olga's workplace, the Montez Air Force Base, Elio sneaks into an emergency meeting where orbital analyst Gunther Melmac claims to have found evidence of aliens responding to Voyager, suggesting they send a message back, but is dismissed by Olga and her colleagues. Elio uses Melmac's device to send his message, causing a power outage at the military base, nearly costing Olga her job. Angered by Elio's actions, Olga decides to send him to Carver Academy, a boarding school sleepaway camp for military kids, which he dreads, as Bryce and Caleb are also there.
At camp, Elio escapes from Bryce, Caleb, and two other bullies one night as they attempt to scare him. Back at the military base, Olga receives strange outer space messages in response to Elio. Just as Elio faces a beating, an alien ship arrives and abducts him. Inside the spaceship, Ooooo, a floating liquid supercomputer, welcomes him with a glass containing a beverage known as glorp and brings him to the Communiverse, a pangalactic organization of the advanced species of the cosmos and a place where aliens from different worlds share their knowledge. Ambassadors Questa of Gom, Helix of Falluvinum, and Tegmen of Tegmeg introduce themselves to Elio and tour him around the Communiverse where he meets Naos, the creator of the Communidiscs which control gravity, temperature, and all known languages, even Elio and his parents made up language “Elioese”. Elio also encounters the Universal User Manual and mimollusks which use nanotechnology to construct anything.
The other ambassadors mistakenly declare him a candidate for Earth's ambassador, thinking he created the Voyager spacecraft. Before Elio can clarify, they attend an emergency meeting with another candidate, Lord Grigon, the Blood Emperor of Hylurg, who requests admittance to the Communiverse however is rejected. The rejected Grigon threatens to take the Communiverse by force. The ambassadors plan to return Elio to Earth, but he chooses to negotiate with Grigon for immediate induction as an ambassador. Ooooo creates a clone of Elio using cloning clay to take his place back on Earth. Olga brings Other Elio home from camp after hearing about the prior fight.
Meanwhile, Elio attempts to negotiate with Grigon on his Hylurgian ship, but after unintentionally angering him, he is imprisoned. While trying to escape, he comes across Grigon's son, Glordon, and befriends him, telling him his secret that he’s just a kid. Glordon readily becomes a bargaining chip for Elio to finally receive attention from his dad and to get his dad to leave the Communiverse alone. They escape back to the Communiverse where Elio negotiates with Grigon who agrees to leave them in peace in exchange for Glordon's safe return. As they prepare for Grigon’s arrival to retrieve his son, Elio gives Glordon a disc that modulates his body temperature since he is sensitive to cold temperatures.
Elio and Glordon explore the Communiverse and have fun (“Hold My Glorp”) eventually confiding in each other; Elio feels alone and misunderstood by his aunt, while Glordon resists becoming a war machine like his father and misses his mother who is fighting in the Blood Wars. Elio devises a cloning plan to keep them together. He puts the real Glordon on an escape shuttle and gives Grigon the clone. Grigon notices the switch and turns to ambassador Questa, whom he uses her mind-reading powers to locate them. Grigon sends troops to find his son, while Questa, disappointed by Elio's deception, returns him home to evade Grigon. Meanwhile, Glordon accidentally activates the shuttle, heading toward Earth.
Back home, Elio is devastated but soon spots his aunt on the beach looking for him with Other Elio, whom she had already suspected was not her real nephew. After reconciling (“Reunion”), they head to the military base, where Elio's shuttle has been contained. Other Elio sacrifices himself to distract the military, while Elio and Olga sneak into the base to find Glordon in the shuttle, dying from hypothermia due to his disc breaking from the impact of the landing. They pilot the shuttle back to the Communiverse, calling Bryce, Melmac, and worldwide orbital scientists for help navigating through a debris field.
Reaching the Communiverse, they return Glordon to Grigon, who rips his suit open to swaddle him, saving his life, and apologizes to his son and the ambassadors. Elio is welcomed back into the Communiverse, but he declines the offer, deciding that Earth is his home, and bids his friends farewell before returning to Earth with Olga (“The Return”).
In a mid-credits scene, some time later, Elio and Bryce are working on a Ham radio and receive a response from Glordon who asks them to tell him everything.