Plenty of joyous visual detail in this Pixar story of a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, but an excess of incident robs the characters of much depth.
Pixar has only Pixar to blame for audiences’ expectations of a Pixar movie: The best of the studio’s films bop us in the tear ducts while encouraging us to look at the world in a whole new way. When one of their new releases, no matter how inventive or visually glorious, fails to deliver in those areas, disappointment is inevitable. Which brings us to Elio.
On paper, their latest seems to fit the formula perfectly: lonely kid (Elio’s orphan status is literally established in the film’s first few seconds) goes on an adventure with wacky sidekicks and learns some valuable life lessons all the way. But while the adventure is suitably wild and the sidekicks are at least visually appealing, Elio never quite clicks in the way that viewers have come to expect from the people behind Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo.
Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab, Merry Little Batman), following the loss of his parents, gets sent off to live with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force officer at a base where satellites monitor the trajectory of space debris. She’s a strong candidate for the astronaut program but has put those dreams aside in favor of family responsibilities. Elio sees an exhibition about the Voyager Record — a golden disc that went into space with the Voyager satellite carrying voices of Earthlings all over the planet, as well as music samples — and becomes obsessed with the idea of contacting and being abducted by aliens, since he feels disconnected from life on Earth. (Voyager is the gift that keeps on giving to pop culture, from the “Send More Chuck Berry” sketch on Saturday Night Live to the “V-ger” entity in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.)
There’s a lot of plot here, from Elio using the Air Force base’s equipment to reach out to the cosmos, to his being brought to an intergalactic United Nations known as the Communiverse (where they think he’s the ruler of Earth) to facing down the war-mongering Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett). The film’s heart can be found in Elio’s first friendship, with Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly); Glordon resembles an overgrown caterpillar, and it turns out that Grigon and his entire warrior race are really just blobby aliens occupying fearful armor, an on-the-nose metaphor that comes off more like a Pixar first draft than something they’d actually put in a movie.
Directors Madeline Sharafian (We Bare Bears), Domee Shi (Bao, Turning Red), and Adrian Molina (Coco) make Elio a constantly joyful spectacle, giving its handful of human characters distinct characteristics while going wild with the alien landscape; the Communiverse is both blobby and linear, defiant of gravity and beautifully geometric. The gross-out gags land as well, from a montage of Elio and Glorden eating and drinking all the treats they want (interspersed with moments of barfing) to a bit regarding a decomposing clone.
But the movie pings so often from plot point to plot point — you can feel the act breaks so strongly, they may as well draw a curtain between them — that we don’t get to go deep enough with Elio or his many relationships. (He is told about himself more often than he gets to demonstrate his own personality.) A trimmer storyline, or maybe multiple episodes on Disney +, might have resulted in a more satisfying screenplay. What we have instead will no doubt entertain kids while giving their parents something to look at, but by Pixar standards, it’s disappointingly earthbound.
