Elio (2025)
Directed by: Adrian Molina and Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian
Premise: An animated film. An eleven-year-old boy (voice of Yonas Kibreab) who is obsessed with outer space is abducted by aliens and must mediate a crisis between a partnership of peaceful extraterrestrials and a warful alien culture.
What Works: Elio has a lot in it to admire. Like many Pixar productions, it is beautifully produced. The outer space scenes are done especially well. The visuals convey the vastness of space but also the wonder of exploration which supports the sense of hope and possibility that motivates Elio’s title character. The interior locations are distinct. The human spaces tend to be very cubist, visualizing the rigidity of mainstream life, while the friendly extraterrestrial spaceship is warm and fluid in a way that brings together various alien species and the villainous spacecraft has a darker and more ominous look. The creature design is quite imaginative and some interesting choices are made in this regard. Elio befriends Glordon (voice of Remy Edgerly), the son of the alien warlord. Glordon has a slug body with a big mouth and no visible eyes. Creatures in movies are usually designed to evoke an immediate emotional feeling; friendly creatures usually have big eyes and feline or canine qualities to shepherd our sympathies but the filmmakers of Elio take the opposite path with Glordon. Like a lot of Pixar films, Elio is about loneliness. Elio’s parents have died and he lives on a military base with his well-meaning but overwhelmed aunt (voice of Zoe Saldaña). He’s obsessed with aliens because he believes they will take him to a place where he’ll finally belong. The emphasis on loneliness is impactful and as in many Pixar films it’s the quiet moments that are the most affecting.
What Doesn’t: Elio is a Pixar film and over the last thirty years the studio has settled on a narrative formula that is as consistent and predictable as Disney’s princess films or any familiar genre template. In Pixar’s paradigm, the protagonist passionately wants to belong to a family or achieve control over their environment, but they end up making things worse and eventually realize that the thing they wanted isn’t what they need. This was a revolutionary narrative in 1995’s Toy Story and it was done well in subsequent films such as The Incredibles and Inside Out. But three decades later that formula has gotten stale especially as it’s presented in Elio. The mechanics of the plot are very obvious. The narrative doesn’t feel like a series of organic events but rather a checklist of Pixar story beats. This becomes especially obvious in the end. Pixar’s aversion to villainy forces the story to twist into an illogical mess; characters behave in ways that are inconsistent and don’t make sense.
Bottom Line: Elio is an acceptable if uneven film. It is recognizably a Pixar production both for better and for worse; it is beautifully crafted and hits the intended emotional beats but Elio is also very safe and predictable.
Episode: #1056 (July 13, 2013)