Elio — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

At around 05:17, Elio's camouflage backpack carries an AREA 113 patch — Pixar's CalArts signature spliced with Area 51, the classified Air Force site that anchors most of American UFO folklore. It is the perfect merge: an in-joke about a school, disguised as an in-joke about aliens, on the bag of a boy trying to get taken. A second A113 turns up at 17:50 on the computer Olga uses to track space debris. The backpack also carries an E.T. finger doodle.

The most undignified placement in the thirty-year history of the gag. During the alien scanning sequence at 22:13, Elio is stripped to his underwear — and the fabric is patterned with the Luxo ball, the yellow-blue-and-red-star prop from Luxo Jr. (1986). Pixar has hidden this object in a pool, a hallway, a bedroom floor and a career parade. Here it is underwear, on screen, in front of an entire alien council.

Elio does not cast a Sagan impersonator. It uses genuine archival recordings of Carl Sagan, drawn from a 1985 radio conversation with broadcaster Studs Terkel about his novel Contact, and threads them through the film — closing on Sagan asking the question the whole story is built around: whether we are alone. Sagan curated the contents of the Voyager Golden Record, the disc NASA launched in 1977 as a message for anyone who finds it, which is the object the film's entire plot depends on.

The voice guiding visitors through the museum's Voyager display belongs to Kate Mulgrew, who spent seven seasons commanding the USS Voyager as Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. Casting the captain of the fictional Voyager to explain the real one is the kind of joke that costs nothing and rewards exactly the audience most likely to be sitting there. The film carries a Vulcan salute at 32:13 as well.

The ham radio set carries the brand name DOMAD, which is DOMee Shi and MADeline Sharafian, two of the film's three directors, compressed into a single fictional electronics manufacturer. Crew signatures usually hide in a licence plate or a background credit; branding the film's key communication device with the people who made it is a considerably bolder version.

Pixar's next feature gets two plants. At 11:19, a file named Hop_Script is visible on Melmac's computer desktop — a screenwriting in-joke, since it is literally the script for the next movie sitting in a character's file system. At 26:34, Tom, the lizard from Hoppers, appears within the Golden Record imagery, and unusually for a next-film tease he stays on screen for a substantial stretch rather than flashing past.

In the same scanning sequence that exposes the Luxo ball underwear, the Universal User Manual displays alien characters that resolve into ANDY — the name written on the boot of every toy in Toy Story. Reading it as a joke about naming is the fun part: the manual is explaining what humans are, and the example it reaches for is the word a child writes on the things he owns.

The streak continues. At 1:15:04, during the space-debris sequence, the Pizza Planet truck is visible parked outside Melmac's garage. It is a standard background placement in a film that otherwise puts most of its references in the foreground, which makes it one of the harder finds here rather than one of the easier ones.

The background is stacked. Toy Story 4 contributes a blue casserole dish and a lemon from the antique shop (56:17) plus a toy rocket from Ducky and Bunny's game in Elio's room (13:56). Coco supplies ofrenda decorations and an Ernesto de la Cruz T-shirt. Turning Red leaves graffiti — a 6 on a porta-potty — and kitten-box wallpaper. Inside Out's fictional TripleDent Gum has expanded into toothpaste. And A Bug's Life is represented by a four-leaf clover in the Golden Record imagery.

Separate from the underwear, the film also plants the lamp. A Luxo desk lamp — the hopping star of Luxo Jr. and the mascot that crushes the I in Pixar's logo — stands in Olga's bedroom, alongside Elio's own shelf of sci-fi and space trinkets elsewhere in the house. Getting both halves of the Luxo joke, the lamp and the ball, into a single film is rarer than it sounds.