Elio: A Modest Odyssey of Space-Bound Friendship (Early Review)

Elio wouldn’t constitute the first time Pixar has been confronted with a mid-production retooling on one of their lofty animation projects, but in the weeks leading up to their latest film’s release, those portentous omens have loomed over the space-bound film like a solar flare aiming for inevitable devastation. Perhaps that’s because every other such incident in Pixar’s catalogue has failed to salvage the films in question anywhere beyond the realm of generous indifference—see: Brave and The Good Dinosaur—but even without the spectre of precedent, any film that sacks its director midway through its making has an uphill battle to convince the stockholders bankrolling its marketing—and, by proxy, those who will end up knowing it even exists and subsequently paying to see it—that the endeavour is worth the investment.

Sad as this capitalistic mindset may be, it isn’t entirely unwarranted when observing the sort of sudden pivots that Pixar has been forced to make with endless rewrites and year-long release delays, but Elio, especially in comparison with the studio’s previous rush jobs, probably emerges about as unscathed as one could expect (or, more accurately, hope) given the circumstances. Indeed, the unceremonious departure of Coco director Adrian Molina in favour of Turning Red originator Domee Shi (alongside debuting feature director Madeline Sharafian) may read as precisely the sort of tonal existential crisis signalled by the cavernous shift in style between the film’s first two trailers, but at its heart, Elio‘s messy assembly belies a relatively sturdy, if simplistic, ode to finding one’s sense of belonging out in the vastness of the cosmos.

Continuing the studio’s Call Me By Your Naming Conventions that began with Luca, Elio follows its titular child (Kibreab) as he struggles to connect on Earth with his aunt Olga (Saldaña), suddenly thrust into a position of parenthood after the vague deaths of the child’s parents. Really, Elio can’t find himself connecting with anybody on this planet, so naturally, he looks beyond the stars for salvation, hoping that, with a message sent to the sky, he might be abducted and taken somewhere where he can find his true calling.

Well, it works. One day, after a brief abduction preparatory montage—which also, for some reason, doubles as a surprisingly fitting music video for “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads—Elio is taken aboard the Communiverse, an extraterrestrial U.N.-equivalent (complete with the real U.N.’s uselessness in confronting heinous, genocidal threats) that welcomes him aboard as the presumed leader of Earth. Elio has no desire to correct them on this flub, instead enjoying the spoils of what he sees to be a new home, despite the threat of a menacing warlord alien Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) who aims for the same ambassadorship that is Elio’s ticket to a permanent ride through the stars. When Grigon doesn’t take the rejection well, Elio takes it upon himself to secure his place by negotiating the war monger’s departure, which winds up requiring the aid of his unassuming and squishy offspring, Glordon (Edgerly).

The friendship that subsequently blooms between Elio and Glordon is the glue that holds the film together when its unfinished threads threaten to pull it apart, as Shi and Sharafian allow the earnestness of childhood play to become a necessary shade under the stifling heat of parental expectation. Neither of these two knows what exactly they want, but they know it won’t be found in the life that awaits them, and they take comfort in each other to find the assurance that they can forge a new path together. It’s a touching enough notion even if Elio never fully engages with it, but at the very least, this lack of full attention comes in part due to the film’s desire to give some more balanced weight to the struggles facing Olga, whose own dreams of becoming an astronaut were sidelined by the sudden call to parenthood.

This same rushed feeling does, unfortunately, carry over into the world that Elio creates, as the vast possibility of unimaginable alien life is mostly relegated to repetitive creature designs, mainly ranging between “vaguely stingray-like” and “nondescript blob.” That said, the elasticity of the character design does at least enable the human characters to perform some of the same humorous facial dynamism that Shi had previously employed in Turning Red to give her characters something of an anime-like quickness in their dispositions; how it appears here is, if nothing else, intermittently enjoyable to watch as its quickness clashes against the gentle fluidity of the surrounding blobby aliens.

Nobody is going to be ranking Elio among the upper echelon of Pixar’s greatest achievements, but given the exceedingly high bar set therein—alongside the lowered bar of both other ramshackle Pixar productions and some recent abysmal offerings (looking at you, Inside Out 2…)—the film’s relative success deserves far more leeway than it will likely be afforded in the ever-present context of opening weekend numbers. At the heart of this film lies a genuine penchant for curiosity, and even if the surrounding milieu fails to fully capitalize on it, this desire to peek into the unknown is a lot of what made Pixar such a force of nature to begin with.

still courtesy of Disney and Pixar

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Julian Malandruccolo

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