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New York Times
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Who Directed ‘Elio?' It's Complicated
After the emotionally resonant final moment of Pixar's new outer-space adventure 'Elio,' the names of directors Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian pop up onscreen — typical for any feature film. But if you stick around until after the mid-credits tag, you might find something curious. Once the crawl starts, another person is also listed as director: Adrian Molina. The discrepancy hints at some of the behind-the-scenes shake-ups involving the film about an orphaned boy who dreams of being abducted by aliens. Midway through production, Molina, the original director, was replaced by Shi and Sharafian. All of the listed filmmakers have history with the company. Molina was one of the screenwriters and the co-director of the hit 'Coco' (2017). Shi directed the red panda puberty story 'Turning Red' (2022), while Sharafian was behind the Oscar-nominated short 'Burrow' (2020). During an interview with The Wrap last summer, Pixar's chief creative officer, Pete Docter, said that Molina was moved off 'Elio' and onto a 'priority project that we're not ready to talk about yet.' (Molina is reportedly working on a 'Coco' sequel due out in 2029, though it's unclear whether that's what Docter was referencing.) Docter, in the same interview, explained that Shi and Sharafian were crucial to figuring out story beats involving the awkward Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), who ultimately gets his wish and is beamed up to an intergalactic summit by kindly extraterrestrials who believe he is Earth's leader. 'I think they've made some major discoveries on him that really helped the audience to connect and to move forward with the character into the second act,' Docter said. On animated films, one person often assumes the title of co-director, a role the Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton once described as a 'jack of all trades.' That's the part Molina had on 'Coco.' But on 'Elio' none of the listed directors have the 'co' prefix. 'Elio' has had a lengthy journey to the screen. The project was announced at Disney's D23 conference in 2022 and was originally scheduled for release in 2024. America Ferrera appeared at that event and revealed that she was playing Elio's mother. That in itself offers some clues as to what changed. In the finished film, Elio's mother is dead and Zoe Saldaña voices his overwhelmed aunt living on a military base.
CBC
a day ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Why Elio's theme of alien abduction is the perfect metaphor for loneliness
Domee Shi, the Oscar-winning Canadian animator and director behind Bao and Turning Red, is back with a new Disney-Pixar movie, Elio. It's about an 11-year-old lovable oddball named Elio who's totally obsessed with space. When his dream of getting abducted by aliens comes true, he suddenly finds himself with a lot of responsibility. In an interview with Q guest host Talia Schlanger, Shi says the theme of alien abduction was the perfect entry point to explore the loneliness that many kids face growing up. The story was loosely inspired by co-director Adrian Molina's childhood experience of being raised on a military base, but Shi and co-director Madeline Sharafian also drew on their own experiences of being artsy kids who struggled to find their place in the world. "A lot of us have been that weird lonely kid in our hometowns who felt like no one really wanted them or understood them, and they were dreaming to find a place where they could belong," Shi says. "For me, that was animation school…. For Elio, that's that moment when he gets abducted by aliens." The movie opens with a young Elio visiting a space museum with his aunt Olga, whom he starts living with after the death of his parents. Shi says Elio's passionate interest in space is what helps him heal from his grief and isolation. "I think we knew from the beginning that that was going to be his quirk and that was going to be his obsession, but it took a while to get under the hood and understand why he wanted to get abducted by aliens so badly," she says. "What was he trying to escape from? That required a lot of looking internally within ourselves, but also we talked to child psychologists [and] we did some research on how children deal with grief, with the scenario of losing both your parents." After getting abducted by aliens, Elio finds an escape from his loneliness by going to outer space where he believes he'll finally find a place where he belongs. WATCH | Official trailer for Elio: "He does want to belong somewhere, but deep down, he is kind of running away from this deep, dark fear of feeling [that] there might be something wrong with him," she says. For each of her films, Shi says she's had to dig up personal experiences from her past to craft a relatable story. "It just makes our films so much richer and I think that's the reason why Pixar films resonate with audiences all over the world," she says. "I think in order to make a film that resonates, you have to be brave. Like Elio does, you have to open yourself up, you have to be vulnerable and show a part of yourself that maybe you're a little bit embarrassed to show the world." The full interview with Domee Shi is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. She also explains why it's nearly impossible for her to write a one-dimensional mother figure. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Elio' Review: Pixar's Sweet, Safe Space Adventure Isn't Exactly Out of This World
In Pixar's Elio, the eponymous young hero (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) gets his wish of being abducted by aliens, and is promptly treated to all manner of otherworldly sights. The Communiverse, an airy floating hub for the galaxy's best and brightest, overflows with extraterrestrials of every imaginable shape, color, texture and method of communication (one spits out balls rather than speak words). They have access to amazing technologies like a 'liquid supercomputer' that's basically a floating Siri on steroids, a machine that can spit out clones, a Universal Users Manual that knows the meaning of life. For Elio, outer space is everything that cold, drab Earth isn't, and it's no wonder he's loath to return home. More from The Hollywood Reporter Disney, Amazon Ink Deal to Expand Advertising Partnership Corporate-TV Branding Has Gotten Out of Control Pixar Gives First Look at 'Toy Story 5,' Teases New Original 'Gatto' at Annecy If only the film itself were half so, well, alien. Instead, watching from our humble blue marble, Elio feels just a tad too familiar in its sights and story beats to seem totally fresh. Directed by Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi, Elio is a perfectly nice kiddie sci-fi adventure that does everything a movie with that description is supposed to do. But much like Elio, I frequently found myself longing for the more transportive experience, of the sort that Pixar used to make a house specialty. The screenplay, by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones, finds a recently orphaned Elio struggling to adjust to his new life with his aunt (Zoe Saldaña's Olga), an Air Force officer who herself is having a difficult time suddenly learning how to parent. Lonely and adrift, Elio becomes obsessed with the idea that if no one on this planet seems to want him, someone on one of the galaxy's 500 million others might — and he seems to be proven right when the Communiverse, having learned of humanity from the Voyager Golden Record, beams him up. Initially, Elio tries to fit in, passing himself off as the leader of Earth in hopes of gaining permanent membership there. But it's with Glordon (Remy Edgerly), the similarly sweet-natured but misunderstood son of a vicious warlord, Grigon (Brad Garrett), that Elio really finds the connection he's looking for, forged over PG shenanigans like drinking way too many neon, crazy-strawed beverages and riding Communiverse waterways like they're waterslides. Will their budding friendship transform both of their lives for the better, making each of them feel more confident and less alone in the universe? Will their combined forces save the day by preventing Glordon's dad from laying waste to the Communiverse? Will Elio then, despite the thrills he's enjoyed in space, come to a better understanding of the real if imperfect love that Olga has been offering him from Earth all along? Well, that would be spoiling. But you can probably guess. There's plenty to enjoy about Elio. Its most striking shots include ones of the Voyager on its journey, looking tiny and alone against the unfathomable vastness of space — and they look even cooler in 3D, where the void seems to stretch in every direction. Their starkness makes the busyness of the Communiverse something of a letdown, filled as it is with bizarre yet oddly unmemorable creatures who look like they could have slithered over from the set of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But Glordon, the most important of the aliens, looks crafted with love. Like so many of Pixar's finest creations, he is a marvel of texture, his slug-like body somehow rendered leathery and scaly and hairy all at once, with feathery tendrils that quiver adorably when he's happy. Perhaps the movie's most interesting flourish is the horror influence it wears proudly on its sleeve, without letting things cross over into family-unfriendly terror. So tender-hearted Glordon has teeth that suggest xenomorph DNA but uses them only to smile, not maim, and a habit of swaddling his visitors in spider-like silk but only to soothe, not trap. And while the cloning machine tends to spit out copies too uncannily agreeable to seem real, they're also too cheerfully helpful to be scary. If Elio's plot points are predictable, they also check every box they're supposed to, in a reasonably efficient 100 minutes. You'll chuckle at Elio's attempts to get abducted by parking himself next to a giant 'Abduct me!' drawn in the sand, and cluck sympathetically at his confession to Glordon that he fears 'there's nothing about me to want.' You'll probably get misty-eyed at the reconciliations and goodbyes you already see coming, and smile at a mid-credits glimpse into the characters living their best lives. Where I never found myself, however, was surprised by any particularly clever insight, or moved by any powerful wave of emotion, or delighted by some daring and original twist. Elio is too straightforward for that, too pat and by the book. The characters are endearing but thin, flattened by a story that favors forward motion over slower, deeper development; their bonds are similarly hazy. Even the happy ending seems rooted less in choices that make sense for them than in a desire to acquiesce to formula. It doesn't make the film any less sweet, but it does make it register less meaningfully. All Elio wants is to know, through all his wild misadventures across the stars, is that he's not alone, that there are others like him and others who might like him. The letdown of Elio is that it seems to feel the same way. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Dazed and amused, ‘Elio' is Pixar on a spaced-out psychedelic trip
'Elio' is a breezy Pixar adventure, the studio's pivot back to making original, rip-roaring children's yarns. Launched by 'Coco' co-director Adrian Molina and steered to completion by Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi, it's got a setup simpler than whatever credit negotiation happened behind the scenes. An 11-year-old boy, Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), looks at the sky and wonders who's up there. This classic plot hook harkens back to 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'A Trip to the Moon,' and if I had to place a bet, it's the oldest story mankind's got. Depending on the era and zeitgeist, the heavenly strangers gazing down upon us in judgment could be anyone from Zeus to 'Dr. Who's' Zygons, and their interest in us capricious or cruel or kind. We've got lightyears' worth of these speculative tales. They're really asking: Does our species have value? In Elio's case, he's a recent orphan living with his aunt Olga (a warm and frazzled Zoe Saldaña), a major in the Space Force who monitors satellite debris (which the film convinces us is more exciting than it sounds). Everyone in the movie is surrounded by technology — radios, computers, monitors — and yet most of them seem disconnected. Olga thinks that alien chatter is for crackpots like her colleague Melmac (Brendan Hunt), so named for Alf's home planet. She's paused her own astronaut dreams to take care of her brooding nephew. In return, the boy wants little to do with her or any other earthling. Preteen Elio is on a misanthropic trajectory that, if not recalibrated, could result in him growing up to marry a pillow. When Olga takes Elio to a space museum, he falls in love with the solitary crusade of the Voyager probe whose golden record of wonders, curated by the astronomer Carl Sagan, is hurtling through the galaxy in search of someone who will listen. (Sagan's own voice is heard throughout the movie, though he goes uncredited.) Enthralled, Elio plops a colander on his head and pleads for aliens to touch down and 'take me with you — but not in a desperate way.' Elio doesn't do too much sulking before he's beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary take on the United Nations. He's not alone in the universe, but now he has to earn his place. From there, his quest vrooms at the pace of a Flash Gordon serial — or, for that matter, the first 'Toy Story.' Kids Elio's age have mostly seen Pixar rehash itself with sequels or hunt for Oscars in a therapist's couch (where lately it's been coming up with lint balls). Here, trauma is merely the framework, not the focus. The highfalutin prestige animation studio is signaling to the 'Minecraft' generation that they can do fun new movies too. The film's earthbound sequences boast staggeringly beautiful shots of the ocean under a night sky. But the galaxy above is a fractalized freak-out: a psychedelic rainbow of delights that makes you think that more than one animator has spent time grooving to Phish in a Berkeley dorm. (No doubt some of the grade-schoolers seeing the movie on opening weekend will, a decade from now, watch it again in their dorms under heightened circumstances.) Multiple extraterrestrials appear inspired by a lava lamp. Others resemble wireless earbuds and stress balls and decks of cards, the type of creature design that might happen when you're in your own alternate dimension grokking at the stuff on your dresser. I'm not casting aspersions on anyone's sobriety, I'm just noting that Pixar was founded on musing, 'What if my lamp could jump?' Elio will befriend Glordon (Remy Edgerly), a larval goofball from the Crab Nebula who has a dozen wiggling limbs with various protuberances. Off-planet, the boy readily drops his defensive shields and opens himself to the excitement that's been promised since the epic opening notes of Rob Simonsen's eclectic score. In a sequence set to a Krautrock-esque banger, Elio and Glordon enjoy a montage that's essentially a teaser for an amusement park experience that's probably already in its drafting stage, with the buddies frolicking in waterslides and chugging a beverage called Glorp, styled so that it can be readily re-created with boba. As ever, everything is tethered to what our earthbound brains can imagine. Even the names Glordon and Glorp might be a nod to the Voyager's known flight plan, which in 40,000 years is expected to have its first-ever close encounter with a star named Gliese 445. Bonding with the miscellaneous beings of the Communiverse does spur Elio to be nicer to Olga, but admirably, the script (credited to Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones) doesn't take the easy escape hatch of sending the earth boy into the beyond only to realize that everywhere else is even worse. Space isn't the enemy. If anything, space is too nice. Most of the aliens Elio meets insist that they believe in tolerance and open-mindedness. You're waiting for that to be a big lie, but it's not. Voiced by Jameela Jamil, Shirley Henderson, Atsuko Okatsuka and Matthias Schweighöfer, they can get a tad snippy, but otherwise these galactic Neville Chamberlains cower when a bruiser named Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), who stomps around on thick metal legs, lands on their base spoiling for a fight. The cartoon well calibrates its PG thrills to give kids a mild case of the shivers. More spunky than saccharine, Elio spends most of the film wearing a bandage over a black eye. Back home, he's pursued through the woods by masked bullies (and when he gets an opportunity, he kicks one of them in the head). In space, Elio stumbles across adorable skeletons and shimmies through gacky pipes. Meanwhile, Lord Grigon's dastardly hobby is skeet-shooting fragile, flowerlike critters. When hit, these living daisies don't die — they're just pitifully embarrassed to lose their petals. It's refreshing to see a romp this spry. 'Elio' isn't trying to reinvent the spaceship — it's after the puppyish charm of sticking your head out the window as marvels whiz past. Some of my favorite gags just sparked to life for an instant, like an all-knowing supercomputer who is a bit put out that Elio accesses its wisdom simply to learn how to fight. It's offering to teach our species the meaning of life; we want the art of war. 'Why should an advanced society wish to expend the effort to communicate such information to a backward, emerging, novice civilization like our own?' Carl Sagan wrote in his 1973 book, 'The Cosmic Connection.' Yet more than half of Americans believe that aliens exist. A third think they've already come to visit. Like Elio, we yearn for cosmic validation. The great scientist wouldn't have put 'Elio' on his golden record. It's a trifle, not a cultural touchstone. But while Pixar has anthropomorphized ants and rats and cars and dolls and emotions, this lonely boy feels stirringly human. Yes, the movie says, go ahead and look for connection up in the sky or under your feet. But also seek it out in each other.
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Elio review: Pixar's all-ages pleasures are in short supply in strangely half-formed animation
Elio Director : Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina Cert : G Genre : Animation Starring : Yonas Kibreab, Zoë Saldaña, Brad Garrett, Remy Edgerly, Jameela Jamil, Shirley Henderson Running Time : 1 hr 38 mins The 29th feature film from Pixar Animation Studios has been a troubled production, marked by repeated delays, limited marketing support and internal studio uncertainty. Originally slated for 2024, the film was pushed to 2025 amid the company's restructuring and mass lay-offs. The original idea, based on the lonely military-base childhood of Adrian Molina, one of the directors of the Pixar film Coco , was reassigned to the short-film director Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi, who made Turning Red . These creative shifts tell in the finished product. The mother of the title character, once voiced by America Ferrera , has been replaced by Zoë Saldaña's aunt, a major in the US air force who specialises in space debris. The family's Latin origins are no longer part of the screenplay. Molina's initial idea remains: Elio (Yonas Kibreab), an 11-year-old orphan, is such an oddball that the other ham-radio kids think he's weird. Since losing his parents he has been obsessed with getting abducted by aliens. Elio finally gets his wish when he's mistaken for Earth's leader, at which he's gleefully beamed up to a Day-Glo intergalactic space station, the headquarters of the Communiverse. READ MORE There he bonds with the equally alienated Glordon (Remy Edgerly) – picture a cuddly version of Dune's sandworms – and vexes Glordon's warlord dad, Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett). Aesthetically, the film recalls Coco but without the elaborate world-building. Emotionally, it's pitched at the slightly hollow level of Onward , with plenty of synthetic lifting from Rob Simonsen's score and a lot of heavy leaning into the magic of the Voyager probe programme of the 1970s. Elio is a half-formed thing. The basic story beats suggest that subplots and jokes have gone missing. Even the buddy comedy between Elio and Glordon is curiously marginalised. The candy-coloured character designs will please younger viewers, but the all-ages pleasures of peak Pixar are in short supply. In cinemas from Friday, June 20th
