If the measure of a good Pixar movie is that it makes you cry, then the studio’s new interstellar romp, Elio, is a rousing success. If the goal is to have a coherent, cohesive story, however, the results are a little less conclusive.
The fact that Disney has been a bit light on marketing for its latest animated offering, which hits theaters June 20, makes more sense once you see just how convoluted its boy-meets-aliens story is. It’s hard to sum up the plot with a simple logline, but you can sort of think of it as every classic ’80s sci-fi adventure rolled into one—E.T. meets The Goonies meets The NeverEnding Story meets Short Circuit, with a dash of Contact, Jumanji, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in there, too.
Elio Solis (Yonas Kibreab) is a whimsical 11-year-old boy whose parents have recently died, leaving him in the care of his overwhelmed aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an aspiring astronaut who works as an orbital analyst at a military base. Because Elio feels so alone in his home life, he latches onto the belief that Earth can’t be alone in the universe. He becomes obsessed with reaching out to the cosmos, literally begging aliens to come abduct him.
Thanks to some convenient timing and an old message from the 1977 Voyager space probe, he gets his wish. Elio is whisked away via a dimension-hopping portal to the Communiverse, a cotton-candy-colored interplanetary haven where the best and brightest minds in the galaxy gather to share inventions and innovations. Not knowing anything about human biology, the eclectic assortment of aquatic-looking aliens mistake Elio as the Leader of Earth. And when they’re threatened by a vengeful warlord named Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), Elio strikes up a deal: He’ll broker peace in exchange for a permanent role as a Communiverse Ambassador.
Just as it seems like we’re in for some sort of Star-Trek-meets-WarGames social commentary, however, the movie throws in a new wrinkle. It turns out Grigon has a son, a delightfully perky tardigrade-esque creature named Glordon (Remy Edgerly) who shares Elio’s sense of alienation and desire for adventure. Now we’re in a full-on kids buddy comedy, complete with a montage of all the wacky shenanigans Elio and Glordon get up to in the alien equivalent of a mall food court.
As Elio continues to hop back and forth across the universe, however, it eventually becomes clear that this is first and foremost a story about parents and the children they don’t quite understand but still love anyway—a moving idea that also feels like a lot of themes for one movie to handle.
Those disparate story threads may be hallmarks of a long and winding production process. Elio started as the brainchild of Coco co-writer/co-director Adrian Molina, who wanted to explore his personal experience of growing up on a military base and finally finding “his people” while studying animation at CalArts. When Molina left the project to work on Coco 2, however, it fell into the hands of Domee Shi, who so poignantly channeled the coming-of-age mother/daughter experience in Turning Red. (Burrow helmer Madeline Sharafian is also onboard as a co-director.) The reworked screenplay also features contributors from Soul and Luca, both of which feel like major influences on Elio’s look and tone.
In fact, the changes were so extreme that the film’s 2023 teaser trailer essentially pitches an entirely different movie than the one that ended up onscreen. With so much new worldbuilding added into the mix, Elio might have been better served as a miniseries than a 99-minute movie. But the upside of its overstuffed, unwieldy story is an ambitious, unpredictable scope. Though it’s frustrating that the film never quite finds a clear central hook or a classic three-act structure, it’s also kind of refreshing, too. (Be sure to stay for both a mid-credits scene and some post-credits bloopers.)
Glordon is the clear breakout star, with the contrast between his creepy larval design and his sunnily upbeat personality hitting a Pixar sweet spot. (Team him up with Neel from Skeleton Crew and Disney could just start printing money.) But it’s fun to spend time with all the floaty, erudite aliens and their fluidly high-tech gadgets, which are mesmerizing to watch. While the human characters are a touch generic in both look and personality, the relationship between Elio and Olga is at least rooted in a welcome sense of specificity.
At its worst, Elio is like a zany Saturday morning cartoon that enchants you with so much colorful character design and action-packed antics that you don’t really stop to think about how little the plot hangs together. But at its best, it taps into a poignant reflection on childhood grief and loneliness. Being unique can sometimes feel like being alone, one character wisely observes. And that’s doubly true if you’ve lost the only two people who truly understood you.
In that way, Elio is perhaps a better spiritual sequel to Lilo & Stitch than the live action remake we got this spring. For all its overt ’80s homages, there’s something timeless about Elio. too. It may be mid-tier Pixar, but that’s still likely to make it one of the better animated offerings of the year.
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