To the groove of Talking Heads’s “Once in a Lifetime”, orphaned 11-year-old Elio Solis (Yonas Kibreab) adjusts his homemade cape affixed with plastic stars, carves the words “ALIENS, ABDUCT ME” into sand, and spreads out on the beach like a starfish. In other words, Pixar is back in the zone, relishing its brief freedom before they’re dragged back to their desktops to make an umpteenth Toy Story sequel (number five, coming 2026).
Elio is witty, sweet, and ready to shred your heartstrings like a teething puppy. It posits that we’re all conducting our own kind of intergalactic exploration, entering other people’s orbits in the hope of finding that elusive element we call friendship.
Elio’s been placed in the care of his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña, returning to the Disney homestead after her recent Oscar win). She loves the kid, but he’s not the easiest to raise, and she clings to her “Parenting Your Spirited Child” handbook as if it were a life raft. He assumes that means she doesn’t want him in the first place, and that it’d be better for everybody if he were spirited away by little green men, since, out of all the planets in the sky, “one of them’s gotta have me – because obviously you don’t.”
That line is one of several kickers in Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones’s script, which sets down a sturdy emotional path through what, superficially, looks like pretty familiar territory for the studio. When Elio gets his wish and is transported to the Communiverse, essentially Space United Nations, we’re dropped right back into the Apple Store aesthetics of Soul’s “Great Before”, or certain cerebral stretches of Inside Out.
And, when he tries to prove himself worthy of joining the Communiverse as Earth’s ambassador by volunteering to negotiate with the bloodthirsty warlord Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), he’s faced with an antagonist who looks a little too much like Buzz Lightyear’s rival, Emperor Zurg.
Yet, despite the film having been hit by every imaginable roadblock – the pandemic, the dual writer’s and actor’s strikes, and the loss of director Adrian Molina to Coco 2, replaced here by Madeline Sharafian and Turning Red’s Domee Shi – it’s surprising how well it’s still managed to emerge the other side with a cohesive and distinctive voice.
If there are borrowed images here and there, there’s a playfulness to how they’re deployed, particularly in the film’s unexpectedly prolific body horror, or the way it doles out references to the likes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.
And, yes, Elio tackles loneliness, but with a nuanced understanding that loneliness is a subjective rather than objective state, a feeling of existing perpetually apart from the world. Whether you choose to read Elio as neurodivergent or not (he has trouble identifying his emotions and holds strong opinions on spoons, for one), it’s affecting to see this little kid agonise over whether he’d feel like less of a burden if he could just act “normal” for once, whatever that is.
And it’s a struggle that gives his eventual friendship with Grigon’s son, the very unwarlike Glordon (Remy Edgerly, and it should be noted both he and Kibreab are wonderful in their roles), a revelatory weight. You’ll likely catch yourself, by the end, weeping while looking up at an alien squid blob who talks like a British Second World War general, one of the Communiverse’s many oddball residents. But that’s just Pixar doing its job, right?
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Dir: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi. Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldaña, Remy Edgerly, Brad Garrett, Jameela Jamil, Shirley Henderson. Cert PG, 98 minutes.
‘Elio’ is in cinemas from 20 June
