Elio (Yonas Kibreab) can’t seem to fit in since his parents died. He butts heads with his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), a harried military officer who is doing the best she can to connect with the kid, and his attempts at making friends ends up with bullying. As a result, Elio has it in his head that he’d bet better off if he were abducted by aliens. I mean, why not? It’s not a huge jump from running off to join the circus!
On a particularly bad day, to his surprise and delight Elio’s fervent wish is granted, and he indeed gets sucked up into a giant technicolor ship that whisks him off to a technicolor world called the Communiverse, a place where technicolor beings from all across the galaxies have created a sort of interplanetary United Nations. Having heard the call of Earth’s Voyager spacecraft, these friendly beings have grabbed the first human they seemingly could find and assumed he was the leader of Earth. It’s understandable they wouldn’t know he happens to be a human in child form.
Elio thrives in this new world of acceptance, including making friends with another “kid,” one enthusiastically friendly creature named Glordon (Remy Edgerly) who looks like a giant purple grub. The Communiverse is everything Elio could have hoped for: a world where he can be his nerdy self, a world he can fit in, a world where he has a new instant family. But of course the fantasy is suddenly threatened with the arrival of one testy warlord named Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) who shows up and wants to blow the whole Communiverse to smithereens.
Pixar, once the gold standard of animation, seems to have lost some of its spark since being enveloped into that gaping IP maw that is Disney. What was once the freshest studio around, with creators that could famously make you cry in a handful of minutes (see gems like the first five minutes of UP, or the short film Lava), now seems under pressure to churn and repeat its famous formula. Elio, especially in the first chunk of the movie, feels like it was created by three writers and three directors because, well, it was. It’s weirdly uninvolving, like watching a kid-centric commercial.
Once it gets to the final act, though, the action picks up a bit. To throw a bone to the adults in the audience, there are some surprisingly clever homages to classic sci-fi and horror sprinkled in (surprising since that first hour seemed churned through a feel-good kiddie fantasy machine). And just when you think your emotions won’t be twanged, Elio gives you a moment that guarantees you will never think of “swaddling” the same way again.
Elio certainly will never rank among Pixar’s best. But even Pixar’s middling quality movies always have a nice message of positivity and inclusivity, so you could certainly do worse.
