‘Elio' Review: Pixar's Space Opera Adventure Needs More Time on Earth
Watching Elio, the title character of Pixar's latest film, it's difficult not to draw comparisons to another child hero underneath the Disney umbrella. Introduced as a shy child reeling from an unspecified accident that took his parents' life, the 11-year-old bursts out of his shell upon an encounter with an installation speculating of life beyond the stars and emerges as a hyperactive, alien-obsessed weirdo who runs around wearing a cape and metal colander helmet, speaks in a made-up language he calls 'Elio-ese,' and drives his Air Force aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) crazy.
From the tragic backstory to the misfit behavior to the tense relationship with his guardian, Elio might as well be the male version of Lilo from Disney's similarly sci-fi themed 'Lilo & Stitch' — it doesn't help that plenty of people went to go see the remake just last month.
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The crucial difference? In the original 2002 animated film that introduced her, Lilo won the hearts of viewers because she was such a specific, sharply written weirdo. She was rough around the edges, bratty and mean, and with eccentricities — a love of Elvis Presley, a belief that a fish on her nearby beach can control the weather — that were singular to her and her alone. Elio is a teddy bear in comparison: he's too instantly sympathetic to ever get properly annoyed at, and his obsession with aliens feels more banal and less personal, a way of acting out after the death of his parents rather than a real passion inside himself. He's easy to like, a sweet kid voiced winningly by spirited child actor Yonas Kibreab. But, like the movie that bears his name, he's a bit too forgettable to fall in love with.
Any Pixar film that's been released since roughly the mid-2010s invites a perhaps unfair game of comparison, measuring how it stacks up to the studio's golden period of the 2000s, when every other film they produced was an instant classic. 'Elio' certainly is a fair sight better than much of the company's latest output, which has geared more toward regurgitating old ideas or sputtering around in shallow storylines. And yet watching it feels a slight bit depressing at the same time, a reminder that where Pixar's films once led the animation industry, taking out there concepts like rats that want to cook and robots that want to find love and bringing exquisite heart to them, they now feel imitative instead of innovative.
If there were ever a version of 'Elio' that had the spark of an old Pixar classic, it got shuffled out of existence by a turbulent production process that saw original director Adrian Molina, who previously helmed the company's Oscar-winner 'Coco,' replaced by the duo of Domee Shi — whose hilarious 'Turning Red' remains the best Pixar film of the 2020s by a significant margin — and Madeline Sharafian, known for directing the short 'Burrow.' Molina based the film's original story concept heavily on his own life, and the directorial transition occurred right around Pixar head Pete Docter admitting the studio would be pivoting away from 'personal stories' driven by directors to films with universal mass appeal. Certain elements of the script directly based on Molina's life, such as Elio's mother working for the military, got rewritten entirely.
The directorial change-up feels readily apparent throughout 'Elio's' 90-minute running time. That's not necessarily due to plot holes or pacing — the film clips along its standard beats at a steady pace, only lagging during one spaceship ride near the end that comes across as pure filler — but the overall feeling that it's only dipping its toes into the emotional and creative depths of this story.
Elio's desire to be abducted by aliens, a reaction to his miserable loneliness on Earth, leads him to send a message via a satellite at his aunt's base to the stars pleading for extraterrestrials to come abduct him. The message gets received not just by a spacecraft but by the Communiverse, a roaming planet-like spaceship holding an international committee of representatives from across several galaxies. Getting whisked away into this fantastically technicolor world is a dream come true for Elio, enough that he's willing to go along with it when the committee reveals their misread that he's the leader of Earth. To secure his place in their ranks, he bravely/insanely plunges himself into solving a diplomatic crisis between the alliance and Lord Grigon (a suitably hammy Brad Garrett), the 'blood emperor' of a warlike race of alien worms from the planet Hylurg, who seeks revenge on the ambassadors for rejecting his bid to join them.
All of this looks fantastic — while on Earth, Elio suffers a bit from that squishy, rounded animation style that's recently become more or less Pixar's house look. In space, the movie experiments more, adding splashes of 2D graphic animation and gorgeous technicolor around the stately white spaces Elio inhabits. The alien designs are suitably weird and inspired, from the mind-reading floating flatworm Questa (Jameela Jamil) to the rock monster Tegmen (Matthias Schweighöfer). One can detect sci-fi inspirations from 'E.T.' to 'Star Wars' all over the film's DNA, and in its funniest and most memorable moments it takes cues from sci-fi horror of all things, including the introduction to Grigon's son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), which has a whiff of both H. R. Giger in the character design and Ridley Scott in the blocking.
But, as fun and creative as some of the individual parts of this spaceship are — from the chibi supercomputer sprite that gives Elio the ability to communicate with other aliens to the cloning goo he uses to explain away his absence on Earth — on a whole, the Communiverse is never as wondrous as you want it to be. None of the ambassadors get enough individuality for us to actually care about them, and their actual goals as an organization are too vague to grasp. Grigon is amusing as a warlord who, at heart, is really a beleaguered dad — he reminds one of Bowser in the Mario games more than any past Pixar character — but his softness is telegraphed a bit too early for him to ever be a convincing threat, even to children. This wondrous world up in the stars too frequently feels more like an amusement park for Elio to run and geek around in than a living, breathing universe.
The real problem, though, might be the material that's earth-bound. 'Elio' draws clear parallels between Grigun's issues relating to Gideon and Elio's disconnect from his aunt Olga, and his desire for alien approval comes from a deeply wounded sense of pain that he no longer belongs on Earth after the passing of his parents. There's some great raw material here, and yet onscreen it never gets to compelling territory. Elio and Olga are simply too generic, stock types that can be found in plenty of modern animated films, for their friction to ever build into something as compelling as, say, Marlin and Nemo's strained father-son relationship.
It doesn't help that Saldaña, whose character is meant to be the story's heart, sounds like she's phoning it in a bit in the voiceover booth. There's no specificity to Elio's circumstances on Earth — his trauma from his parents' deaths gets mostly brushed over, the isolation he feels from his peers is represented via a stock bully, even the town he lives in is a generic suburbia — which makes his yearning to escape to the stars ring hollow.
So, by the time Rob Simonsen's rather generic score begins to overdo the bombast and the film gears up for an emotional decision from Elio about where he belongs that it has to take more than a few logical leaps to arrive at, the pathos falls a tiny bit flat. It's difficult not to wonder what 'Elio' could have been like, had the original concept from Molina made it onscreen, and whether or not the more 'personal' version of this story had the sharp edges and specificity needed to elevate the film from a cute kids' film to something more meaningful.
'Elio' isn't a bad time at the theaters — it's pretty to look at, charming enough, and frequently funny. But by shying away from investing in where its main character is coming from, the movie makes his galactic adventures feel a bit weightless.
Disney will release 'Elio' in theaters on Friday, June 20.
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