Elio begins with an idea that resembles classic Pixar Animation, something that starts with vague familiarity, like how we’ve all imagined our toys coming to life, and goes in an inspired direction, like reimagining those living toys as emotionally needy surrogate parents. It’s an inversion of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., where a young boy briefly soothes his loneliness as a (middle) child of divorce with the presence of a friend from another world. Here, 11-year-old Elio (Yonas Kibreab) yearns not to host a visitor, but to ascend into the stars and combat his loneliness by finding new, different lifeforms to befriend. When he unexpectedly gets his wish and is abducted by a cadre of various creatures from across the galaxy, the movie also uses the ending of Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind as a jumping-off point. Elio isn’t remotely frightened; he augments the visual cliché of a tractor beam drawing a human upward by frantically paddling, hoping to get to the aliens even sooner.
There are lots of stellar little moments like that throughout Elio, which, coming on the heels of a cheap-looking Lilo & Stitch photocopy, feels gloriously unmoored from the tedious limitations of live-action. The Communiverse, the sort of trippy, traveling United Nations of the galaxy, is full of strange, fanciful creatures—and versatile soft goods, like the blobby, adorable, Studio Ghibili-like little guy called OOOOO (Shirley Henderson) who’s actually a gelatinous computer, doling out discs that function as invisible, universal translators. That’s how Elio comes to better understand Glordon (Remy Edgerly), a wormy, eyeless creature who’s also the son of the fearsome Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), a wormy alien in an Emperor Zurg-esque mech-suit. Initially Grigon competes with Elio for an open spot in the Communiverse; through a misunderstanding, Elio has been mistaken as an Earth leader, rather than a child, and in his glee at possibly being whisked away on a spaceship, he dares not issue a correction.
Does that sound like a lot of different set-ups for a movie that’s barely 90 minutes before its credits roll? As many wonderful moments as Elio has, it never quite achieves the same fullness of the best recent Pixar. It has elements—namely kid characters in tight friendships, depicted with a cartoonier style—and creative staff from all of the studio’s past-decade original highlights, with directorial credits for Domee Shi (Turning Red) and Adrian Molina (Coco), alongside Madeline Sharafian making her feature debut, and writers from Turning Red and Luca among those credited on the screenplay. But within the thicket of credits, there are suggestions of the patented Pixar rejiggering: The primary directorial credit is shared between Shi and Sharafian, because they took over the project from Molina, who receives a smaller, separate credit later in the roll.
None of this is especially unusual for a Pixar project, which is usually even more of a massive team effort than most movies. But it has seemingly left Elio zigging and zagging around its various storylines, and unlike other Pixar pictures, the busy nature of the storytelling doesn’t conceal hidden depths of feeling. More often, it disguises a lack of complexity: Elio is a friendless orphan in the custody of his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), a military scientist who has put her astronaut dreams on hold to care for her nephew; he assumes she doesn’t much care for him. Glordon and Lord Grigon have their own fractured child-and-guardian relationship, sweet but familiar. There’s no emotional twist to Elio’s desire to abscond from Earth. It’s what it seems, and resolves more or less as expected.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for a Pixar cartoon that feels, at times, more like an episode of Futurama than a tortured metaphysical metaphor; there’s not much time or occasional to build up Elemental or Soul levels of conceptual flop sweat. Scene to scene, Elio maintains a sweet-natured unpredictability, with gags and sequences that sometimes appear almost free-associative in their whimsy: Glordon and Elio zip through a spaceship’s lava-flow piping system; clones melt into goop when they’ve outlived their usefulness; Grigon monologues about the destruction of his enemies like he hails from Omicron Persei 8. Second-tier Pixar can be pretty damn good. It may be the only Disney sub-brand left where constant tinkering at least results in something strange and even lyrical, rather than lifeless.
Unfortunate, then, that the filmmakers would use E.T. and Close Encounters as reference points, because there’s nothing here that matches the pain or awe—the Earthiness!—of those movies. Perhaps more importantly, there are recent Pixar movies with similar-aged protagonists, technically smaller ambitions, and way more confidence in their ability to translate quirky fantasy for mainstream audiences. In Turning Red and Luca, the characters’ youthful friendships feel specific and lived-in. Fun as it is, Elio just goes for the montage, eager to speak a universal language.
Directors: Domee Shi, Madeline Sharafian, Adrian Molina
Writers: Julia Cho, Mike Hammer, Mark Jones
Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldaña, Remy Edgerly, Brad Garrett
Release Date: June 20, 2025
