'Elio' Continues the Age of Passable Pixar
The studio's new movie is fine, but feels beneath the story standards of earlier classics.
There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Elio. For all the changes affecting Pixar since it started producing features back in the 90s, their films are rarely dismal. But for the past decade, the tight storytelling that fueled their movies has been largely absent, and Elio is a continuation of that absence. While there have been a couple bright spots (Inside Out, Coco), more often than not, we’re getting films that are fine but forgettable whether they’re sequels or spinoffs to classics (Finding Dory, Incredibles II, Lightyear, Inside Out 2), exciting on first watch but lacking endurance (Toy Story 4, Soul, Turning Red), or inoffensively resting on the formula of comedy with some heavy emotional beats (Onward, Luca, Elemental). Elio falls into this last category, a shadow of what Pixar used to be, and potentially a much stronger picture had the filmmakers given the story some necessary polish.
12-year-old Elio (Yonas Kibreab) lost his parents and is now in the care of his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who tracks space debris at the Montez Air Force Base. After seeing a planetarium display about life on other worlds, Elio believes that extraterrestrial life is the cure for his loneliness. He sets out to become abducted, and gets his chance when the Olga’s base receives a message sent back based on the Voyager Golden Record. Elio pleads to the aliens to come get him, they do, and then mistake him for the leader of Earth (something he doesn’t correct because he wants to stay). To keep his place among the alien council, The Communiverse, he has to negotiate a peace with the violent Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), but ends up befriending Grigon’s son, Glordon (Remy Edgerly), who doesn’t want to be a warlord like his dad. As the two misfits bond, it becomes more difficult for Elio to keep up his ruse.
A major problem with Elio is how it treats so much of its prologue as perfunctory, never fully landing the emotional beats it needs in order for the rest of the story to land. Think about how much emotion Pixar packed into the prologues of Finding Nemo and Up, which also deal with loss, but Elio never treats the deaths of his parents as something real. It’s merely background, and the film’s true interest is about getting him into space to hang out with aliens. There’s also little time establishing any kind of relationship with Olga, even though the movie wants to pay off their emotional connection as the heart of the movie. Elio wants to be a movie about the pain of loneliness and the power of finding connections, but it doesn’t spend enough time trying to make either of those emotions land.
That doesn’t make the movie “bad,” but it does create a void that the filmmakers attempt to fill with loads of humor and imaginative visuals. I can’t deny that Elio has some great jokes and is a pleasure to look at, but it still feels oddly empty. Similar to its lead character, the film always feels like it’s trying to outrun its mistakes, hoping that a big smile and a colorful personality can cover up some glaring emotional shortcomings. For a studio that used to be known for making audiences weep, there’s little here that leaves an impression, even though you can see where we’re supposed to care about these child-parent bonds.
The most surprising moments of Elio have little to do with its main story and instead exist in individual scenes and moments where you see the filmmakers straining to do something outside their wheelhouse. Several scenes feel distinctively influenced by horror cinema, even though Elio isn’t a horror film or meant to be scary to little ones. These brief scenes almost scream that the studio could do more, but since Pixar will never get the chance to make a horror film (even a PG one), they can only make fleeting nods to these creative pursuits as they pass by. All the outer space stuff in Elio is brimming with neat ideas, but they feel like doodling in the margins rather than investing in the central story.
I imagine life at Pixar isn’t easy right now. Even if you skipped past the layoffs and excising a trans character from your animated series to appease bigots who will never be happy, you’d still be competing against one of the most celebrated legacies in Hollywood history. That’s not easy, and it’s even more difficult when you consider the studio’s original brain trust is long gone. The current crop of animators knows the standards, but instead of having the creative freedom to reach them, you have a release date to meet and Disney as your corporate overlord. I’m sure an original title like Elio feels like a win when you’re staring down the barrel of Toy Story 5, Incredibles III, and Coco 2. But that’s not enough, especially when competing studios are doing better work. Inside Out 2 made loads of money, but it rightfully lost Best Animated Feature to Flow, a film from a tiny animated studio in Latvia. Even their big competitors like DreamWorks Animation and Sony Pictures Animation are trying to find where they can push the envelope visually and narratively.
Elio is the product of a studio that’s playing things so safe they’ve lost sight of the traits that powered them to greatness in the first place. It’s yet another buddy movie (as almost all Pixar movies tend to be), and it’s an echo of when these movies worked wonders. The problem with Elio isn’t that it’s bad, but that Pixar keeps looking at their movies and saying, “good enough.”