Elio is A Lovely Space Adventure For the Outsider In All Of Us
Gorgeous, out-of-this-world visuals are buoyed by a sweet story about loneliness and grief.
Are we alone in the universe? It’s a big question that many of our greatest scientists, philosophers, and thinkers have pondered, so naturally it’s one that Pixar’s latest animated feature tries to unpack. And though Elio is a wild space adventure jam-packed with all sorts of whimsical alien creatures, its answer to that question is surprisingly small and intimate. Though, if you’ve seen any Pixar movie, it’s probably not that surprising.
Elio follows Elio Solis (newcomer Yonas Kibreab), an 11-year-old boy who, after losing his parents, goes to live with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) on the military base where she works as a space debris analyst. Feeling alone and unloved, he develops a fascination with aliens after stumbling into the base’s planetarium, where he’s instantly awed by the wonders of the cosmos. Elio becomes obsessed with the idea of being abducted by aliens: he turns his wall into a murder-board of UFO sightings, he starts tinkering with a ham radio to try to catch signals from the deep reaches of space, and he goes to the nearby beach every day, laying on the sand surrounded by the message “Aliens! Abduct Me!!”
Elio’s behavior baffles Olga, who struggles with being suddenly thrust into parenthood, and makes him the subject of nasty bullying by his peers. But Elio seizes a chance to make real contact with aliens when military contractor — and fellow oddball — Gunther Melmac (Brendan Hunt) detects a signal coming from outer space and offers to send a message back. While Olga shuts Gunther’s offer down, Elio secretly sends a message (a rambling, unhinged one in which he calls himself “shredded”) asking that the aliens pick him up. And that they do, believing Elio to be the leader of Earth, and offering him a place in their idyllic “Communiverse,” an intergalactic organization filled with the greatest minds from across the cosmos. But this cosmic paradise is threatened by the alien warlord Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), who is furious at being rejected by the Communiverse, and vows to conquer it and all its inhabitants — but not unless Elio has something to say about it.
Like Disney’s recent space adventure movie Strange World, Elio is a bit of a pastiche — dashes of Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Arrival can be seen all over this film. But unlike Strange World, which sometimes felt like it was caught up in the grander ideas and more ambitious concepts of its story, Elio feels strangely down-to-earth. Its strongest themes are its simplest ones: the idea of feeling like a perennial outsider, and wanting to escape a world that doesn’t want you.
Elio during his daily ritual in which he pleads with aliens to abduct him.
It helps that Elio is one of Pixar’s more eccentric protagonists, an undeniable weirdo who insists on speaking in his own invented language, and dons an array of capes that he made himself. One of the strengths of Pixar’s characters is how undeniably flawed they can be, and as Elio gets caught up in his outrageous lie, his flaws — and the increasingly bad choices he makes — become all the more glaring. And yet, while it’s easy to judge him, it’s even easier to sympathize with him. Who among us has not felt like an outsider, unloved by even the person who is supposed to be caring for you? It makes sense that its personal themes resonate so strongly: the premise is inspired by the childhood experiences of co-director Adrian Molina (Coco), who had a lonely upbringing on a military base.
Elio is a jumble of plot threads and ideas, some of which threaten to overwhelm the central story of Elio learning how to overcome his feelings of non-belonging. And with the array of co-directors (Molina is still given a co-director credit, but ended up leaving the project to helm Coco 2, leaving the movie to Turning Red’s Domee Shi and Pixar short Burrow director Madeline Sharafian) and multiple screenwriters which include Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones, no wonder Elio can feel overstuffed. The themes of grief are somewhat glossed over after it’s established that Elio is an orphan, and the awkward relationship between Elio and his aunt Olga, though one of the thornier and more intriguing dynamics that Pixar has depicted, is somewhat rushed through. There are some moving depictions of the difficulty of parenthood — shown in parallel with Olga and with Lord Grigon and his cheery son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), but Elio doesn’t have time to unpack all of its ideas.
The Communiverse is threatened by Lord Grigon.
However many half-baked ideas Elio tries to tackle, its stunning visuals make it easy to forgive its flaws. Elio’s depictions of the beauty of the cosmos and the dreamy Communiverse offer some of the most dazzling imagery that Pixar has ever achieved. Full of rich purples, warm oranges, and lights that bounce off ever surface, Elio’s visuals are nothing short of breathtaking — balancing its photorealistic imagery of the Earth and the galaxy with its more fantastical designs of the Communiverse, which feels like Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream made it to space.
Elio might have a few too many ideas in its head, but it ultimately delivers a thoughtful, lovely ode to the outsider in all of us. Intimate, sweet, and surprisingly moving, Elio is a cosmic visual feast that cannot be missed on the big screen.
