‘Elio' reviews knock Pixar for ‘repeating itself' with ‘forgettable' space adventure

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Pixar is once again returning to the stars for its latest family-friendly adventure, Elio, which stars Oscar winner Zoe Saldaña, Yonas Kibreab, Remy Edgerly, and Brad Garrett. But according to the reviews that have just gone online, the cosmos do not seem to be aligned for the studio's new offering.
In theaters on Friday, Elio tells the story of a young boy (Kibreab), who develops a fascination with outer space and yearns to be abducted by aliens in the wake of his parents' deaths in an accident. The set-up offers that signature Pixar blend of whimsy and tragedy, but according to Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson, Elio may have stuck too close to the recipe.
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"I do wonder if Pixar—long the standard bearer of American animation — may be reaching the bottom of its thematic barrel," he writes. "The studio's latest film, Elio, has all the lush and lively imagery one expects from the company. But the film's effort to do the other Pixar trick — delivering a wistful, homespun treatise on some universal emotional matter — runs aground on all-too-familiar shores. Pixar has begun doing what it once seemed it never would: repeating itself."
Later in his review, Lawson calls out Elio's confused thematic messaging, which seems to be a struggle for screen time between "grief" and "self-acceptance." In her review, Vulture's Alison Willmore picks up on that same divide and wonders if the issues behind the scenes led to a hodgepodge of morals. "Elio, which itself began as the baby of Coco writer Adrian Molina, only to then be ceded to directors Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian, plays like something that was imperfectly assembled from its component parts, as though its creative team couldn't figure out a way to align its visions of candy-colored intergalactic diplomacy with its emotional themes of empathy and learning to think about what's going on inside those around us," she writes.
IndieWire's Wilson Chapman drew an interesting connection between Elio and the protagonist of another recent cosmic Disney adventure. "In the original 2002 animated film that introduced her, Lilo won the hearts of viewers because she was such a specific, sharply written weirdo," Chapman writes. "She was rough around the edges, bratty and mean, and with eccentricities — a love of Elvis Presley, a belief that a fish on her nearby beach can control the weather — that were singular to her and her alone. Elio is a teddy bear in comparison: he's too instantly sympathetic to ever get properly annoyed at, and his obsession with aliens feels more banal and less personal, a way of acting out after the death of his parents rather than a real passion inside himself. He's easy to like, a sweet kid voiced winningly by spirited child actor Yonas Kibreab. But, like the movie that bears his name, he's a bit too forgettable to fall in love with."
And while The Hollywood Reporter's Angie Han also noted some of the retreads present within the movie, the experience of watching it was pleasant enough to be serviceable. "Elio feels just a tad too familiar in its sights and story beats to seem totally fresh," she writes. "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."
But considering this is Pixar, a studio known for its big emotions, mileage can certainly vary with how resonant those feelings are with its viewers. IGN's Carlos Aguilar certainly responded, awarding Elio a 9 out of 10 in his rave. "With incisive humor, radiant, eye-catching animation, and peculiar alien characters, there's enough entertainment value in Elio to satisfy viewers who are the protagonist's age or younger," Aguilar writes. "But it's the heartfelt insight about universal (literally and figuratively) sorrows and joys that make this one of the studio's most poignant projects to date – even if it leaves you wishing some of its imaginative concepts and creations would have received more screen time."
Among the review aggregation sites, Elio currently has an 83 percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 61 percent "generally favorable" on Metacritic.
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