Elio review – Pixar's goofy, giddy guide to the galaxy offers charm and vulnerability

The Guardian

7 hours ago

There are some sweet retro-Spielbergian thrills in Pixar's amiable new family animation, whose release was delayed a year due to the strikes; it also has some touches of Douglas Adams as well as John Lasseter's Toy Stories. There are co-director credits for Pixar stalwarts Adrian Molina (who was the co-director and co-screenwriter of Coco) and feature first-timer Madeline Sharafian, and Pixar will be hoping for a handsome return here to match the success of its recent box office champ Inside Out 2.
Elio may well indeed do the business. It has charm, likability and that potent ingredient: childhood loneliness and vulnerability. Its opening act is set aboard a military base where an ambitious young officer has postponed or even abandoned her dream of being astronaut to look after her orphaned nephew. But once the film leaves planet Earth and its recognisably real, lump-in-the-throat emotional world and inhabits the goofy multi-voiced arena of space aliens, it loses, for me, a little (though not all) of its charge. There is occasionally something a little formulaic, a bit programmatic and … well … which two letters of the alphabet sum it up?
The film takes place in the present day, though references to 'ham radios' might confuse you a little. Yonas Kibreab voices Elio, a little boy with a tousled short haircut, like Barry who opens the door to the aliens in Close Encounters, or Alfred E Neuman on the front of Mad magazine. He is deeply traumatised and depressed by the death of his mum and dad and now lives on the base with his aunt Olga, voiced by Zoe Saldaña, a smart, squared-away young unmarried officer who is now his legal guardian. She is at her wit's end, utterly at a loss as to how to get through to him.
A visit to the space-exploration museum turns things around. Elio is thrilled by the exhibit dedicated to Nasa's Voyager 1 space probe which launched in 1977, sending out a message of peace to any life forms in outer space. So he starts transmitting poignant pleas to any intergalactic life form to abduct him because no one loves him down here on Earth. (Here, the movie surely missed a trick in not using the Carpenters' version of Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft on the soundtrack.) Due to a bizarre quirk of events, Elio finds himself being mistaken for Earth's official ambassador by a benign, UN-style outer space assembly called the Communiverse, and asked to negotiate on their behalf with the aggressive alien Lord Grigon (voiced by Brad Garrett) who wants to take everything over. Elio fatefully makes contact with Grigon's troubled, peaceful son Glordon (Remy Edgerly).
There are plenty of nice touches. Before starting negotiations with the terrifying Lord Grigon, Elio has schooled himself in what can only be called the art of the deal, and reminds himself: 'Start from a position of power.' Whoever can have inspired screenwriters Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones on this? And given that the film was ready in 2023, could it be that they considered this person a harmless figure of fun, apt for marginal humour and safely confined to the dustbin of history?
Maybe. The cosmic crisis continues, complicating Elio's relationship with Glordon – leading to a very Spielbergian near-death incident – and with his ersatz mother. Plot developments mean, perhaps oddly, that Elio has to wear a blue eyepatch for much of the movie, a contrivance that facilitates an identity reveal. Overall, it's an entertaining bit of summer fun.
Elio is out on 19 June in Australia, and on 20 June in the UK and US.