Thirty years ago, Pixar rocketed into the popular imagination with Buzz Lightyear’s much-quoted motto, “To infinity and beyond!” Twenty-eight hit animated movies later, infinity comes for Elio Solís, an emotionally complicated 11-year-old orphan who feels so alone on Earth that he looks to the cosmos for company. The story of a kid who wants to be abducted by aliens — and what happens when he gets his wish — “Elio” is right at home in the Pixar catalog, but lacks those undeniable signs of intelligent life (wit, surprise and the capacity to expand the medium) that set the studio’s best work apart.
Perhaps that’s asking too much, considering that “Elio” is a mature work of family entertainment, engineered to impart a lesson that any child who feels unloved, mistreated or out of place would surely benefit from hearing — namely, you are not alone. To make absolutely certain that no one misses that point, the script (credited to Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones) circles around to a poignant quotation from Carl Sagan best discovered in context.
Directed by Madeline Sharafian (the Pixar short “Burrow”), Domee Shi (“Turning Red”) and Adrian Molina (“Coco”), “Elio” lands amid a renewed interest in all things astronomy, from billionaires competing to build the better rocket to the declassification of government files on UFOs. As the film opens, the title character (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is still grieving the loss of his parents and doesn’t get along with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who now serves as his legal guardian.
It’s surprising that these two don’t click, seeing as how they share the same obsession: Olga, who works as a major in the government space program, gave up being an astronaut to raise him. Or maybe Elio can sense her resentment. Children have an uncanny ability to intuit what goes unsaid. In any case, Olga is clearly overwhelmed and exasperated by Elio, who’s not identified as autistic (as some have speculated online) or disabled (there’s a good explanation for his blue eyepatch).
Elio’s personality is defined mostly by pity in the first act, as the poor kid’s insecurities turn potential new friends — Bryce (Dylan Gilmer) and Caleb (Jake Getman), who express an interest in joining his ham radio club — into bullies. Elio is so convinced of his own unlovability, he insists, “There’s 500 million habitable planets out there, and one of ’em’s gotta want me.” The boy’s desire to be abducted is a novel way of retreading a familiar Pixar trope: When cartoon kids feel misunderstood, they strike off on their own (see “Coco,” “Luca,” “Inside Out” and “Finding Nemo”). Running away is starting to feel like a real cliché in the studio’s movies.
Inspired by an exhibition on the Voyager 1 satellite, which carried a “golden record” of friendly greetings from international children, Elio starts sending messages of his own to space. As luck would have it, a giant ship carrying well-meaning aliens of all sorts has just entered Earth’s orbit, and they rather naively misidentify Elio as its leader — a false assumption he’s in no hurry to correct, as Elio would rather join the so-called Communiverse (a sort of interplanetary United Nations) than try communicating with Olga or the others he’s written off back home.
Here, an Arthur C. Clarke quotation comes to mind (less charitable than the Sagan one the filmmakers went with): “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” The Communiverse vessel comes in peace, though there’s a bloodthirsty Hylurgian warlord with far more belligerent intentions aboard. Elio is so desperate to ditch Earth that he agrees to negotiate a deal with Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), who has the razor teeth of a shark and the squishy body of a silkworm. (Disney-loving kids will likely see a resemblance to Captain Gantu from “Lilo & Stitch,” while the word “deal” should remind grown-ups of a real-world powermonger.)
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Whereas the first half-hour of “Elio” seems better suited to live-action — which is preferable to the bubbly, rubber-chew-toy look of Pixar’s human characters — the toon studio has ample ability to shine once the aliens appear. All of a sudden, the ship and all its inhabitants give the animators license to go wild. Elio experiences his new environment like a giant amusement park, and audiences ought to get a similar thrill from their whirlwind tour. Even the bathrooms are mind-blowing, while the exotic mix of species recalls “Star Wars’” influential cantina scene.
There’s a mind-reading pink manta ray, a plant-like entity that burps orbs when it speaks and something that looks like an ancient Incan avocado, all sharing the same space. Surely among these super-brains is one who can recognize Elio’s secret: He’s just a kid looking for a new set of friends. In the film’s defining scene, Elio comes face to face with Grigon’s supposedly ferocious spawn, Glordon (Remy Edgerly, providing the film’s most memorable voice), only to discover — with the help of a universal translator — that this periwinkle menace is anything but. In Glordon, Elio finds the intergalactic bestie he’d been hoping for.
“Elio” is most fun once it becomes a buddy movie. Because it’s Pixar, the comedy is balanced by moving emotional beats, not just between Elio and Olga (who’s suspicious of the relatively docile clone taking Elio’s place back home) but also with Glordon and his world-dominating dad. It must have been tempting to imitate ’80s classics like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “Flight of the Navigator” once Olga’s military colleagues take possession of Glordon’s escape pod, but the creative team hatches original solutions in the final stretch, culminating in a pair of well-written reconciliation scenes. Say what you will about Elio, but Pixar remains the leader in that department.
From Variety US