Raspberry scented weirdness: will Elio be Pixar's wildest ride to date?

The Guardian

04-04-2025

Pixar's film-makers are famously asked to pitch three unique ideas when proposing new projects. In terms of Elio, unique is very much the operative word. Presumably that pitch went somewhere along the lines of: 'A lonely kid is mistaken for Earth's ambassador by a UN-style council of sentient celestial bath bombs dipped in day-glow glitter and floating in a malfunctioning lava lamp.'
If you thought Inside Out, with its candy-coloured Freudian crisis management team, was pushing it, the studio's latest project may make you suspect Pixar has fully surrendered to the void, and is now making films for children who are made of sherbet and tie-dye, rather than flesh and bones.
Elio has been an ominously long time gestating. At least one director (Coco's Adrian Molina) has left, as has its original star (America Ferrera, who was once set to voice Elio's mother). The film was announced in 2022, and was originally scheduled for release in 2024 before being bumped owing to industry strikes and Disney's evolving release strategy. But such hiccups are not, it seems, terminal, for happily it is in the nature of Pixar projects that they can be workshopped again, re-rendered and emotionally fine-tuned in the digital ether long after the initial pitch.
At a screening of footage this week it became clear that Elio has every chance of joining Up, Wall-E and the Toy Story films at the zenith of the studio's work. It may be weirder than anything we've yet seen – at one point our hero makes friends with a tardigrade as reimagined by Takashi Murakami. But the whole thing looks to be conceived with such care, clarity and cosmic heart that we're reassured they haven't lost the plot – just decided to colour it in with raspberry-scented, jellybean-flavoured crayons from another dimension.
Elio's storyline centres on the titular 11-year-old orphan, newly adrift after the death of his parents and now living with his aunt (a kind but driven, overworked wannabe astronaut voiced by Zoe Saldaña). Lonely, friendless and emotionally marooned, he's developed a not-so-quiet conviction that somewhere out there, the universe is just waiting to deliver him into the kind of epic, star-straddling adventure that might finally make him feel seen.
It's not giving too much away to reveal that Elio's dream comes true – and he is soon delivered into the many welcoming limbs of the Communiverse, a sort of UN-style council of extreme cosmic decency that promptly honours him as Earth's esteemed leader. Unfortunately, he's arrived at the precise moment the intergalactic parliament is facing a terrible new threat that it appears pitifully ill-equipped to handle.
There's a definite hint of ET to Elio's wide-eyed longing for connection with something beyond the stratosphere. But where Spielberg never showed us the extraterrestrial's home planet – or even the inside of his ship – directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi are determined to shine a very bright light on the glowing, pulsating, neon-drenched heart of the galaxy. If you ever despaired at the constraints of 1970s and 80s sci-fi – films that, for technical and budgetary reasons, left a lot to the imagination – Elio looks as if it might just finally reward your faith, especially if your idea of outer space is an interstellar disco thrown by Ziggy Stardust inside a melted pack of Skittles.