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Indian Express
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Elio movie review: All smiles, and then some
Elio movie review: Pixar's latest is the staple story of an orphaned child, only this time it doesn't just have him rediscovering his family right at home but also finding one across the universe. It isn't exactly a voyage into the unknown, but it's not a wasted ride either. The titular Elio (Kibreab) is grieving the loss of his parents and proving a handful for his aunt Olga (Saldana) when he catches a presentation on the Voyager, the spaceship that has gone further than any and is still on its journey more than 45 years after its launch. Elio particularly latches on to its message that 'We may not be alone' and goes on to try everything he can to get the aliens to 'abduct' him, including scrawling the message on sand. Given that Olga is an aspiring astronaut working on a space base, the inevitable is close at hand, and somehow Elio gets beamed up. ALSO READ: Sitaare Zameen Par movie review: Aamir Khan delivers fully committed performance in heart-winning comedy The place where he lands is a kaleidoscope of luminescent colour, with creatures floating on their own or on what look like petals, having created a world called 'Communiverse', inhabited by 'the most brilliant minds of the universe'. They presume Elio is one such and is 'the leader of Planet Earth'. Elio, not really inclined to dispel the notion, soon finds himself swept into the conflict between this peaceful world and Lord Grigon (Garrett), who calls himself the Blood Emperor and is a metal-and-menace Marvel-lite creation. Too many complications happen next, including cloning, and the themes the animation explores may be lost on children. Elio does strike a friendship with Grigon's son Glordon (a wonderful Edgerly), but this too loses its way in the chaos unfolding between the many worlds. Glordon's apprehension that he is a disappointment to his ferocious father is ultimately the film's sweetest. He seizes with glee Elio's ploy to make him a 'bargaining chip' against his father. 'All I have ever been called till now is a liability, a burden,' Glordon says cheerfully. Carl Sagan's words ring out more than once in Elio. The search for alien life, he said, touches 'the deepest of human concerns' – 'Are we alone?' Often, we don't have to look so far. Elio movie cast: Voices of Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Remy Edgerly, Brad Garrett, Shirley Henderson Elio movie directors: Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi Elio movie rating: 3 stars
Irish Independent
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Elio review: Charming extraterrestrial animation doesn't boldly go far enough for adults to love
When events at the nearby airforce base where aunt and guardian Olga (Zoe Saldana) works bring that dream to reality, Elio is zapped to the Communiverse, a peaceful space society of various alien races. But he's mistaken for an official emissary from Earth rather than just a lonely boy reaching out to see who's listening. When Elio befriends the offspring of a galactic warlord, he causes a diplomatic incident. This is all very 'nice', with the character expressions and elasticated action sequences bound to strike a chord with little people. But Pixar's name was built upon the grown-up wit it smuggled beneath the kid-acting, somewhere Elio declines to boldly go. As for the title character and the story's child-alien bromance, co-directors Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi and Adrian Molina seem to be banking on their target market not having seen a certain Spielberg sci-fi classic just yet.
USA Today
a day ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
'This is just who I am': Pixar's new 'Elio' explores loneliness
'This is just who I am': Pixar's new 'Elio' explores loneliness Show Caption Hide Caption Zoe Saldaña talks new Pixar movie 'Elio' Zoe Saldaña reveals why she can relate to the emotional message in her new Pixar film 'Elio.' 'Elio' is the latest Pixar animated adventure to explore friendship, loneliness and the importance of human connection. Our 11-year-old hero just to has to go out of this world to find his best pal. In the sci-fi family film (in theaters June 20), Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is an orphaned youngster who lives with his Air Force major aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) but the quirky kid has a hard time getting along with her or other children. So much so that he yearns to be abducted by aliens. Wanting to belong and thinking one's place is somewhere else are themes that touched Saldaña about the project. 'Kids can be pretty rough with each other. And adults, because we're juggling so many things and also dealing with our own sorrow, it's hard to completely understand children or give them time and space,' says the recent Oscar winner. Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox Elio's dream comes true and he gets beamed up to a spaceship of the Communiverse, an organization with representatives from across the galaxy, and the kid has his mind blown by so many colorful and interesting creatures. They think he's the leader of Earth – and he doesn't go out of his way to correct them – but Elio really comes out of his shell when he makes fast friends with the blobby and gregarious Glordon (Remy Edgerly). 'Elio' takes the 'Are we alone?' question that we ask about our place in an uncharted universe and the possibility of alien life, and then riffs on it being something we ask ourselves when feeling isolated or unloved. One of 'Elio' filmmaker Domee Shi's favorite moments is in the beginning, with Elio stretched out on the beach in the middle of a sandy crop circle that reads: 'Aliens! Abduct me!!!' 'It's like you want him to achieve his goal, but then you also feel bad that he wants to leave Earth,' says Shi, who wrote and directed the movie alongside Madeline Sharafian. 'He's tenacious. He's got one of the crazier drives out of any of the Pixar characters." 'Elio' trailer: Boy meets alien BFF in Pixar's sci-fi movie A lonely 11-year-old boy dreams of being abducted by aliens and winds up on a spaceship in Pixar's animated sci-fi comedy "Elio." The fact that this kid is pretty much done with our planet is "a tragic reflection of what's going on in the world today,' Sharafian adds. 'We've seen it maybe with Carl Fredricksen (in 'Up') and some other of our adult characters that there's this kind of bah-humbug feeling about the people around them. But to see it in a character so young is sort of heartbreaking. 'It was up to us to decide: Why does he feel this way about Earth and how can we change his mind?' But it wasn't just Elio feeling forlorn. Olga, who dreams of being an astronaut, and her nephew get in arguments, and it's because she's worried about Elio, though he doesn't see that. 'She's doubting she even has the ability to be a good parent for him,' she says. 'And instead of him seeing that as this almost cry for help, he sees it as 'She doesn't want me.' ' From a more cosmic perspective, Glorgon's dad Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) also wants to feel part of a community, specifically the Communiverse, but his aggressive nature is alienating. Because Hylurgians are a race of soft, squishy worm aliens, Grigon wears battle armor to shield himself and make him look strong and tough. 'Elio also has this internal armor that he's put up in himself, too, after his parents passed away,' Shi says. 'And this turning point for his relationship with Gordon is he lets his armor down.' 'Elio' reminded Kibreab, 14, of feeling lonely during COVID lockdown. 'It was sad because you couldn't really see friends, couldn't hang out with them,' he says. 'It was mostly on FaceTime. I couldn't see my sister often like I do now. And it was hard to find friends and find things to do during that time.' Also, it's sometimes difficult for Kibreab to find peers because he does online school. 'I don't see kids that often. And when I do, maybe sometimes they'll think I'm strange because of being me,' he adds. 'A very important part that this movie talks about is just being yourself and to never change because of someone else. And I think that's kind of how I tapped into Elio.' Saldaña also sympathized with Elio because she lost a parent when she was 9. Discovering and bonding with like-minded people in the art community helped Saldana face moments of loneliness. 'It turned out that there are people that feel lonely, too, (and) misunderstood that were really extroverted in their artistic selves but very introverted in their personal selves,' Saldaña says. 'I was able to realize that, one, I wasn't alone. And two, there's nothing wrong with me. This is just who I am.'
UPI
a day ago
- Entertainment
- UPI
Movie review: Pixar's 'Elio' impresses with sci-fi, politics
LOS ANGELES, June 19 (UPI) -- Elio, in theaters Friday, is another Pixar triumph. Like the animation studio's best, Elio is impressive in both its creative story and its poignant themes. Elio Solis (voice of Yonas Kibreab) lives with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) after the death of his parents. He dreams of meeting aliens to take him away from his lonely life on Earth, though he does make friends with Bryce (Dylan Gilmer) over their passion for HAM radios. Elio's messages are received by the Communiverse, an intergalactic society of peaceful aliens. At the same time Elio is welcomed into the Communiverse, warlord Grigon (Brad Garrett) is denied for his violent temperament, spurring him to declare war on the group. The peaceful Communiverse would simply flee to the far corners of the universe to avoid Grigon and his Hylurgian army, but Elio assures them he can make peace with Grigon so they don't have to leave. Learning to stand up to bullies is a valuable message, but Elio goes much deeper than that. For a child to attempt to negotiate intergalactic peace requires the childlike audacity to believe he can do what adults can't even do on Earth. Grigon values powerful displays of aggression and cannot see the benefits of cooperation, let alone humility. That is a challenge to reconcile between societies, as well as between two individuals. The character is the closest Pixar has ever come to addressing real-world politics. The way Grigon talks about being the greatest leader and winning negotiations certainly sounds familiar to anyone currently watching the news. To put a finer metaphorical point on it, the Hylurgians literally wear armor to conceal their vulnerable form. If Pixar knows that aggressive posturing usually indicates an emotional wound or need, hopefully audiences can learn that too. Elio's childlike solutions to complex issues create more problems, however. Both Elio and the aliens try everything to avoid having difficult conversations, in Elio's case talking to Olga about how he feels and what he wants. Elio makes friends with Hylurgian child Glordon (Remy Edgerly), which serves a greater purpose than simply showing Elio had to go across the universe to make friends. It also shows that alien children have just as much trouble communicating with their parents as humans, and vice versa. To the film's credit, neither human nor alien parents are shown to be oblivious to their children's needs. Both Olga and Grigon notice when their kids aren't acting like themselves. All of these relationships pay off in the film's climax when the characters engage in exciting space action. In designing Elio's adventure, Pixar applies its imagination to alien worlds. This leads to a variety of adorable Communiverse creatures with soft, rounded features, contrasted with the sharp, jagged Hylurgian design. Of course, the sharp, jagged design is the armor the Hylurgians constructed to make themselves look intimidating, to wear over their true forms. Ever since Toy Story 2, Pixar films have been known for imbuing their imaginative stories with profound themes. Elio is one of their finest examples along with the Toy Story movies, Up and Inside Out. Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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.
