Sorry to lead with the negative stuff, but Elio (now streaming on Disney+) is Pixar’s worst box-office performer to date (not counting the films whose returns were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, of course). Here’s the positive stuff: It doesn’t deserve such a fate. Its $153 million worldwide gross reflects how original Pixar stories are tough sledding these days, but at least the animation studio still remains committed to fresh ideas moving forward – the next half-dozen releases will alternate between originals and almost sure-fire hit sequels (you’ll recall that Inside Out 2 raked in, sheesh, $1.7 BILLION, with Toy Story 5 hitting next year and The Incredibles 3 and Coco 2 in the works). Some might quibble that Elio – co-directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi (Turning Red) and Adrian Molina (Coco) – isn’t “original” in the strictest definition of the word, since it’s a familiar story about a lonely boy and space aliens that sure seems to draft on a number of Steven Spielberg films, but if you stop thinking so much about things and start simply enjoying things, you’ll be charmed by this sweet little tale.
The Gist: SPACE! How high can you go? Elio – he wants to know. We meet the kid (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) cowering under a table at the aerospace museum. We overhear his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldana) in conversation. “We’re managing,” she says, adding that she’s no longer planning to enter the astronaut training program. Elio’s parents died, and Olga’s now his legal guardian. His face reads sadness and guilt as he sneaks away, into a closed, still-in-the-works exhibit about the Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched into space in 1977, destination who-knows-where, carrying messages for whoever might find it. He’s moved by it, enamored by the thought of Life Out There, In A World Outside of Yonkers. And now he wants to be abducted by aliens. Is there a better way to escape one’s earthly problems? I’ll wait while you think of one.
Elio’s obsession with being lifted into a UFO and taken to parts unknown develops in a montage set to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” because despite his efforts to build a communication device, his life is the same as it ever was. Maybe he needs a Speak and Spell. Do they still make those? Aunt Olga is no help – she’s an Air Force major who tracks space debris, and not someone who operates one of those satellite dishes big enough to occupy a city block. Elio’s troubles multiply – he’s been skipping school and staying out late and fighting with bullies, and when Olga learns all this, she sends him to camp, and next may be boarding school. Note, she’s not an evil aunt. She loves Elio. She just doesn’t know what to do with him, how to nurture his happiness, how to help him heal. She surely has some healing to do herself. She’s frustrated.
What with one thing (Olga’s coworker receiving a signal from Out There) and another (Elio secretly responding to the signal), our protagonist experiences some strange phenomena and zwooop, he’s sucked into a spaceship resembling a spinning psychedelic top, and rocketed through a more right-angles/straight-lines version of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to an amazing place called the Communiverse, where numerous aliens gather, ambassadors of their species. A “liquid supercomputer” named Ooooo (Shirley Henderson) that looks like a word balloon from a comic strip crossed with a lightbulb outfits Elio with a translator so he can understand that all the bizarre, beautiful beings think he’s Earth’s ambassador, and not just some random kid. He goes with it, fearing being zwoooped right back to his dreary old life.
To prove his mettle, Elio agrees to negotiate peace with an intimidating, heavily armored larva monster, Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), who’s been repeatedly rejected from the peaceful Communiverse for being a warmongering imperialist. It goes poorly. Elio gets tossed in prison, and Grigon pilots his heavy artillery toward the Communiverse. Elio squeezes into an Aliens air vent – there’s ALWAYS an Aliens air vent when a movie character needs one – and finds himself making a new friend in Glordon (Remy Edgerly), who just so happens to be Grigon’s offspring. Grigon’s offspring who doesn’t want to be a heavily armored warmongering imperialist like his father before him, mind you, so maybe Elio has an ally now. Elio and Glordon bond during a let’s-go-crazy-Broadway-style montage, but soon realize they have to do something to stop Grigon from turning the Communiverse into an asteroid field. Meanwhile, back on Earth, has Olga noticed her nephew is gone? Nope. Because Ooooo cloned him, and the doppel took his place, and is just a little too agreeable and happy to not be suspicious. And what we have here is best described as a rather precarious situation.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are obvious ones, and there’s an on-the-nose Terminator 2 reference. I also recalled a Movie That Time Forgot, a cutesy animation from 2015 called Home, which deals in similar concepts and themes.
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Kibreab’s vocal performance ably covers a wide range of emotion without going too big or obvious. He’s good.
Memorable Dialogue: Elio is THRILLED when an alien needs a bit of his DNA, and extracts some from his nostril: “Wow! My first probe!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: It’s tough being a kid. It’s easy for adults to forget that, since our minds are cluttered with responsibilities and demands and miscellaneous troubles large and small. Elio lightly, gently tells a colorful, energetic story about a kid who doesn’t know what to do with himself or his grief, finds something that interests him and hopes for it to be the solution to his problems. There’s something sweet and idealistic about his interest in space and the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but there’s also something unhealthy about his obsession with it. Whether the film truly allows Elio to reckon with this imbalance is in question; beneath the action, adventure and comedy, it functions as a coming-of-age story, but doesn’t seem to be interested in aping many other Pixar existentialist tearjerkers plied with yearning and deep reflections on childhoods that can never truly be reclaimed or revisited.
Is this a good thing? On one hand, it’s a relatively shallow endeavor, especially in the context of the Pixar filmography. On the other, Pixar has edged ever closer to redundancy and self-parody as it repeatedly stocks its youth-oriented stories featuring anthropomorphic characters with subtexts reflecting the bittersweet perspectives of adults looking back wistfully on their childhoods and the things they’ve lost since then. That Elio addresses some heavy subject matter without metaphorically reaching into our chest cavities and tearing out our hearts is a relief. Kleenex ain’t cheap, you know.
The issue here may be the film’s tendency to rechew story beats from countless other sci-fi sagas before it (it brought to mind everything from episodes of Rick and Morty and Futurama to John Carpenter films and Alien, and one character name is slam-bang reference to the sitcom ALF). I acknowledge the point and counter it with the film’s tendency to fill the screen with succulent eye candy, whether it’s the breathtaking visage of the Communiverse, which is like the Death Star if it were conceptualized by hippies, or the design of the aliens, which are inspired by everything from microscopic tardigrades to the nuttier deep-sea creatures to the fuzzy clowns in carnival games you chuck balls at. There’s plenty here to be delighted by. I was more charmed than deeply moved by Elio, and right now, that’s preferable.
Our Call: We’re long past prime Pixar. Accept that fact, and you’ll enjoy Elio more. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.