The latest animation from Pixar has been in the pipe for quite some time, and while that’s not so strange for such a labor-intensive production, it’s telling that the finished version bears little resemblance, story-wise, to the film promised by the trailer released in 2023. But even without that knowledge, there’s definitely something off here; despite a cast-iron central premise — a desperately lonely young boy seeks a close encounter of the third kind — Elio never quite figures out what to do with it. It’s pretty obvious that the original intention was to celebrate the outsider and make a point about finding one’s tribe, but somewhere along the line that all got lost, and we’re left with spectacular film about the vastness of infinity that ends up an Earthbound parable about family ties.
When we first meet him, 11-year-old Elio Solis (Yonas Kibreab) is recently orphaned and living with his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña). Olga is a major with the army, working as an “orbital analyst”, and has seemingly parked her ambitions to become an astronaut after taking on her nephew. During a visit to the local Air and Space Museum, the near-catatonic Elio is brough out of his shell by an upcoming exhibition celebrating the Voyager space program launched in 1977. “Is life really out there?” the narrator wonders, and Elio hopes there is, spending hours on the beach with a sign saying, “Aliens abduct me.”
Elio’s obsession with space becomes a problem for Olga, first after Elio gets involved in a fight with a couple of older boys over an eerie ham radio signal and, secondly, when he causes a huge power outage at her workplace by trying to reply to it. “Your life isn’t up there, Elio, it’s down here,” she tells him, before enrolling him a miserable sleepaway camp, where he is bullied for his belief in little green men. At which point, Elio finds his prayers answered: A spacecraft appears and sucks him aboard. After a quick once-over by liquid space computer Ooooo (Shirley Henderson), Elio is then taken to the Communiverse, a kind of brains trust represented by all the myriad gelatinous lifeforms of the galaxy.
Mistaking Elio for the leader of Earth, the Communiverse sets about approving his application to join them, but this process is abruptly halted when “the other candidate” — ill-tempered warlord Grigon (Brad Garrett), AKA The Blood Emperor — throws a tantrum after being turned down and threatens to return with force (“Prepare to be conquered!”). When the Communiverse responds by shutting down, Elio rashly offers to negotiate with Grigon and come to some sort of peace settlement. It’s a story as old as time, if not Galaxy Quest (1999), and while Elio prepares his play, Ooooo fashions a lookalike with cloning clay and sends him back down to take Elio’s place on Earth.
Elio’s mission falls at the first hurdle; imprisoned by Grigon, he encounters the warlord’s soft-hearted son Glordon (Remi Edgerly), and the pair strike up a friendship. It’s also the point at which the film starts to come apart, notably in an extended bonding montage that adds little to the plot and looks a lot more like the episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Milhouse go crazy on a Super-Squishee from the Kwik-E-Mart. Nothing after this point seems to make any sense, since Elio now has everything he set out to get, and, from so high up in the heavens, the only way is — quite literally — down.
Visually, it’s as spectacular as you might imagine, but somehow nothing feels terribly new: Elio’s ambassadorial spaceship looks like the Inside Out command module; Grigon bears more than a passing resemblance to Buzz Lightyear’s nemesis Emperor Zurg; and the Communiverse looks pretty traditional compared to Disney’s 2022 animation Strange World. Likewise, the characters don’t exactly trip off the tongue, with names that sound like you’ve suddenly gone deaf in one ear (thank God for production notes). Most disappointing of all, though is the sense of compromise that hovers like a storm cloud over the film’s deeply unsatisfying, not to mention unconvincing ending, which seems to turn its back on everything Elio is into and has always been looking for. It’s hard to believe that this is the film Pixar set out to make, and all the evidence suggests it isn’t.
Title: Elio
Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina
Screenwriters: Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, Mike Jones
Cast: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldaña, Brad Garrett, Remi Edgerly, Jameela Jamil, Shirley Henderson
Distributor: Walt Disney
Running time: 1 hr 38 mins
