Elio is classic Pixar — but the boundary-pushing doesn’t always pay off

Pixar was built on risks. From its earliest days, the animation studio tried things no one had tried before: producing the first full-length CG animated feature; pushing the emotional limits of kid-friendly movies with stories built around death and loss; focusing on original characters, stories, and designs, rather than retelling familiar fairy tales or emulating existing and well-established animation styles.

Compared to some of Pixar’s biggest swings, its latest movie, Elio, feels safe in some regards, like an echo of Pixar’s most successful past patterns. But Elio’s themes and setting feed into one of the biggest challenges American animated movies have faced over the last several decades: selling imaginative science fiction to a mainstream public.

Disney and Pixar both have a history with retro-future science fiction movies that failed on theatrical release, from Atlantis: The Lost Empire to Treasure Planet to 2022’s Lightyear and Strange World. All those movies speak to the difficulty of selling American theatrical audiences on weird, colorful, unfamiliar worlds, even if they feature relatable characters or familiar storylines. And Elio is openly weirder than most of those movies — production designer Harley Jessup has said the studio was actively aiming for a world that looks like nothing science fiction fans have seen on screen before.

That push toward visual innovation is a Pixar hallmark, and one that should theoretically impress novelty-hungry audiences. But for all the visual dazzle on display, Pixar movies most clearly revolve around their emotional hooks. And Elio’s beats feel strangely scattered: The story, credited to Mark Hammer (Shotgun Wedding) and Pixar veterans Julia Cho (Turning Red) and Mike Jones (Soul, Luca, Dream Productions), has one distinctive theme running through it like a clothesline, but it hangs so many different things off that line that the weight becomes unwieldy.

Elio’s title character is an 11-year-old boy, Elio Solis (Yonas Kibreab), who has lost both his parents; he now lives with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force officer on a team that monitors debris in Earth orbit. Elio is obsessed with aliens, and longs to be abducted. On some level, he believes no one on Earth really wants him anymore, so he wants to go somewhere new. But his monomania about leaving the planet makes him weird, pushy, and selfish, prone to shoving away anyone who might become a friend, Olga included.

Eventually, due to a series of events involving his aunt’s Air Force satellite dishes, an adult alien obsessive (Ted Lasso’s Brendan Hunt), and some kids interested in ham radios, Elio does end up in space, mistaken for Earth’s leader by a dotty, beneficent, kind of cowardly group of high-tech aliens known as the Communiverse. They’re facing a problem that Elio volunteers to solve: new prospective Communiverse member Blood Emperor Lord Grigon (Everybody Loves Raymond’s Brad Garrett) seems kinda violent and scary, and willing to conquer the Communiverse if they won’t let him join.

The plot goes in several different directions from there, all linked to Elio’s need for connection. The Communiverse offers validation and escapism, but at a price. Elio’s aunt loves him and is trying to help him through his grief, but he’s so caught up in his own drama that he refuses to believe that. The ham-radio kids share his interests and could be friends, but he’s missing that potential entirely. When Elio does make a friend on his space journey, it’s a terrific boon for both of them, but his friend’s presence opens up even more plot points, about parental expectations and societal traditions.

Elio is an extremely pretty movie, packed with adventurous trips through fractal wormholes and suspicious water tunnels, underground lava tubes and a space-debris field. It’s fast-paced and often funny, zipping from one locale to the next, and one plot point to the next, with a speed that suggest a busy tour group trying to pack in as much as possible. The Communiverse itself feels both alien and somewhat familiar — visually and vibe-wise, it’s strongly akin to the “Great Before” from Soul, a bright and glowing abstract space crowded with eye-catchingly strange translucent shapes and comfortingly warm colors. But it’s also packed with a wide variety of mostly pastel aliens with goofy voices and widely varying designs. And all of it feels a bit like a distraction from the heart of the story: Elio’s struggles to let other people in.

Coco co-director Adrian Molina initiated the Elio project, but at some point moved on to Coco 2 (or was moved by the Pixar brass, depending on who’s telling the story), leaving the film in the hands of Pixar’s Domee Shi (Turning Red) and Madeline Sharafian (Burrow). That personnel change might explain why Elio frequently feels divided, like the filmmakers are working from a list of great ideas that they didn’t have time to dig into, but didn’t manage to winnow down, either.

The Communiverse’s collective meekness and extreme vulnerability to bullies might pass as a political plotline worth exploring in a different movie. The fact that Blood Emperor Lord Grigon and his culture of conquest relies on technology that keeps his people from exposing their own vulnerabilities feels like the kind of central metaphor that could carry an entire Pixar film — or at least connect in some way to the Communiverse’s weaknesses — but it blurs by amid many other plot points. (Grigon’s periodic references to “the Blood Wars” raise a lot of questions as well, though they mostly play as offhanded comedy.) And Aunt Olga’s longing to be an astronaut, and willingness to give up her dream to raise her nephew, seems like an important piece of character-building — but the intended payoff moment for that plot thread passes without even a comment. 

Elio pulls in so many directions at times that it feels like an outline for a full season of television, an entire series bible of potential story angles. Packed into one movie, though, these elements sometimes work against each other. There are setups without payoffs, and payoffs without setups. A late-film setpiece that joyously unites people around the Earth in a single worthy cause is a bit of both.

Elio himself is an enjoyable character, the kind of kid who’s meant to be both a bit aspirational for kid audiences, and simultaneously sympathetic and exasperating for adult viewers. His goofy dedication to alien abduction and his willingness to do whatever it takes to stay in the Communiverse are strong story drivers that push the narrative and character-building forward at the same time. But they aren’t always relatable. This is where the risk of weird retro sci-fi stories comes in: Enough of Elio is dedicated to exploring wild animated dreamscapes and bizarre settings and creatures that there isn’t always room to unpack the story points that most need unpacking.

All of which leaves Elio as another Pixar risk. The filmmakers aren’t just gambling that this time around, audiences will finally embrace a strange, colorful, unfamiliar world, filled with unfamiliar creatures and conflicts. They’re gambling that this world will be enough of a distraction and enough of a draw that viewers won’t question Elio’s ultimate choices, or wonder about all the storylines this movie opens up and doesn’t close off. Like all the other Disney and Pixar movies on the “science fiction that failed in theaters” list, Elio is a big-swing movie, an attempt to push viewers out of their comfort zones and into a strange new setting. But while it successfully blasts off to a colorful new world of wonder, it doesn’t always land.

Elio opens in theaters on June 20.