Elio, review: Pixar's voyage to space is refreshingly weird
Elio is an agreeable junior space odyssey that's a safe bet for families in the run-up to the summer holidays, even if it's not destined to be a Pixar film for the ages. You can pick all sorts of holes in it here and there – a game for restless adults, maybe. But plenty of younger viewers will be spirited away with no complaints.
Whatever the teething troubles that made its budget soar to $300 million, the film has at least been shepherded up to par. While it's unlikely to do a fraction of the $1.7 billion business Pixar's Inside Out 2 managed last year, it has a refreshingly zany take on one boy's all-consuming hobby.
Elio (voiced by Yonas Asuncion Kibreab) is a recently orphaned 11-year-old, who feels lonely, despite all the best efforts of the aunt (Zoe Saldaña) who's raising him. A bit of a nerdy cipher, he seems to be somewhere on the spectrum. He's not the first neurodivergent character from this studio (take Dory in Finding Nemo), but feels a few drafts away from being as endearing as those others. If that difference is, in a sense, his 'superpower' – as this film suggests – it's puzzling how little he gets to flex it.
His one solace is being obsessed with space, and he yearns for some connection in the cold reaches of the universe: life on Earth has simply not panned out the way he wants. Miraculously, his prayers are answered, well beyond making radio contact with alien civilisations. An intergalactic parliament zaps him into their midst and considers him for an ambassadorial post – gullible enough to believe he's Earth's leader, simply because he tells them so.
The odd bods in this council owe much to the wibbly senators in Star Wars. There's a playful dash of Douglas Adams ' absurdity there, too. When they refuse to elect a warmongering bully named Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), he declares Armageddon and only Elio has the guts to enter into peace talks. Grigon wears a giant armoured carapace and wields cannons, but inside looks like a tardigrade, much like his chubby son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), who dreads the day he's supposed to strap in and become a feared war machine like his dad.
The oddity of Elio is that this subplot is quite a lot more touching than the hero's journey. A father-son reconciliation between these piglet-sized space slugs is the one thing in danger of moistening the eye.
The film is too scattershot to be high-end Pixar. It tries to add jeopardy with a breakneck voyage through flying debris in space, a sequence that feels arbitrarily inserted. Still, this vision of the cosmos is goofy enough to keep your youngsters beguiled for 90 minutes.
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