Elio

Pixar knows how to make a great movie, and while this one is no exception, it’s not as memorable as I was hoping it would be.

The latest animated feature from Pixar, Elio follows our titular 11-year-old protagonist (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) after the unexpected death of his parents and his subsequent obsession with all things extraterrestrial. Now living with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force major who struggles to raise her nephew while balancing her demanding and highly secretive work life, Elio has taken to devoting all of his time and energy to contacting off-world beings in an attempt to get abducted, effectively allowing him to leave his problems — and the entire planet of Earth — behind. Unexpectedly succeeding in his endeavor, Elio is soon mistaken by his new alien acquaintances for Earth’s ambassador and is thrust into the middle of a galactic conflict that he is ill-prepared to solve. Befriending a worm-like alien named Glordon (Remy Edgerly), son of an invading warlord who will stop at nothing to get his way, Elio must contend with his new place in the universe while also coming to terms with the real reason why he wanted to abscond to the stars in the first place.

Being a sucker for anything space/alien-related, Elio is one of the more enjoyable Pixar films in recent memory, if just for its cosmic setting and space-based production design alone. Beautifully animated throughout (Pixar movies keep finding ways to look better and better with each new entry), there is no doubt Elio excels on a visual level, with its story alternating between a fun sci-fi romp and a serious character study in a way that gives the film a unique tone that I honestly wasn’t expecting.

Despite some of its subject matter getting handled with a lighter touch than I was hoping for, this film is by no means riddled with flaws, with the biggest issue I have with it stemming from the fact that I struggled to remember what I had seen only a few short hours after leaving the theater, making Elio, in some respects, a dangerously forgettable experience. To my point, I’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint a standout scene or sequence that I could use to convince others to watch this one, leaving me puzzled as to why a lot of it didn’t stick with me in the way the film clearly wanted — something that feels super weird to say about a Pixar production.

Maybe it was due to the script’s jumbled and unfocused storytelling or the lesser ways it chose to handle its main character’s struggles that didn’t work for me. But thanks to a handful of genuinely effective emotional beats that (eventually) bring Elio’s character arc full-circle, I can ultimately call this one a success even if said success is firmly sitting at the lower end of the studio’s usually high bar. To paint a better picture, I can see this one falling right outside/inside my top ten Pixar films, depending on the day and my current stance on A Bug’s Life and The Incredibles.

By the time the credits rolled, I couldn’t think of anything egregiously wrong with Elio, but I still left the theater feeling like something was missing from it that ended up lessening its impact in a way that left me wanting. And while I loved the general set-up of this film, it’s our young protagonist’s struggles as a kid who simply wants to belong that affected me the most, earning Elio an easy pass in my book. Elio is an above-average Pixar flick, which, by default, means it’s better than most other movies out right now, so be sure to give it a watch when it hits Disney+!