Released: 19th June
Seen: 23rd June
Original movies are becoming something of a rarity these days, either relegated to the indie circuit or they have to be made by some well-known auteur who has enough cache to get his weird original concepts past the studio system. Look at the top 10 highest-grossing films of this year, with the notable exception of Sinners, they’re all either sequels, remakes or based on a very well-known piece of IP. It’s a sad reality that audiences just aren’t going to see original films at the rate that they used to. There could be many reasons for this, a run on effect of higher theatre ticket prices meaning people want as close to a sure bet as they can get, part of the post-Covid era issues, it could be related to the rise of streaming or the saturation of the market or it could even just be a horrible self fulfilling prophecy where the big studios don’t advertise their original films that well so people don’t know about them. Case in point, did you know there was a brand new original Pixar film in cinemas right now that’s not a sequel to Toy Story or any of their other classics and that it’s also deliriously charming? Well, now you do.
Elio begins like a lot of Pixar/Disney films do, the main characters’ parents are very, very dead (I suspect they were gunned down by the same lunatic mob that kills all Disney parents). Now Elio (Yonas Kibreab) lives with his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) but they are having trouble getting along since Elio feels like the only people who ever truly loved and wanted him are no longer around. On a trip to Olga’s workplace, Elio learns about space and the potential for extraterrestrial life and decides that clearly the place he actually belongs would be in space among the stars and the extraterrestrial life forms. He keeps trying to find ways to communicate with them, including just writing messages in the sand for them to come and abduct him, and one day he gets his wish. The aliens find one of his messages and invite him to join the communiverse, an area where creatures from all over the universe meet to trade knowledge. It seems like Elio has found where he belongs… and then an intergalactic warlord shows up and gives us a conflict for the third act of the film.
The keyword that describes Elio as a film is just “Charming”, straight up the entire film oozes adorableness and charm from every single pore. Its earnest desire to just tell a sweet story of a boy who doesn’t feel like he belongs is one of the most precious things that has been on screen all year. There’s an effortless sweetness to the entire film’s proceedings, like it just knows what to do in order to pull on the heartstrings just enough to make you fall in love with this rambunctious child. From the moment we meet him in his awkward non-verbal state, this is one of the few times where the “Dead parents” trope Disney loves so much actually seems to truly inform the character because Elio is a kid who lost everything important to him and can’t function properly anymore. You might even be able to view him as somewhat neuro-divergent in his obsessions, his mannerisms, his little quirks and awkward social graces. He’s just a kid trying to work out how to get through in this weird world and it’s adorable.
What’s also quite spectacular about Elio is that it’s not afraid to embrace a bold colour palette, which feels like something that used to be standard in cinema but god damn is this film just happy to throw in all the colours in the paintbox. Blues, pinks, purples, bright colours just litter every frame and are used so well. This might be one of the prettiest-looking films in Pixar’s catalogue, they really pushed themselves here with how they made all these wonderfully strange designs fit together. The aliens are a particularly glorious design triumph, every single one feels dramatically different in terms of what species they belong to but it never feels like they don’t belong in the same universe. It’s hard to pull off coming up with a bunch of elaborate, creative aliens that don’t look like anything we’ve seen before, but Elio pulls it off. Every scene is a genuine treat to look at, while I might not say it’s the best-looking film Pixar has made (There are some high bars to clear there), it’s certainly up there with some of their best.
What really helps with Elio is that it’s such a simple and easy-to-follow story that just about anyone can relate to. We’ve all had those moments where we feel completely alien to everyone else, those moments where we thought no one wanted us and Elio shows that those moments are normal to feel, but there’s always someone there if we’re willing to let them in. For such a quick simple film, it packs a lot of fascinating stuff in there that could be looked into. There’s a lot about the film that touches on the ideas of toxic masculinity, on peer pressure, on acceptance and forgiveness and even a scene that could be interpreted as the alien version of coming out of the closet. It’s a film that has a lot of really clever subtext all wrapped in a silly story about a boy and some aliens. It’s one of those films that’s just easy to get through and enjoy, get a few good laughs, have a little emotional cry at the sweet bits and then go about your day.
Elio is just a darn cute film that presents us with a fun and relatable lead, some insanely cool alien designs, more than a few fun action scenes and all the colour you could hope for in a film like this. It’s an easy film for the whole family to enjoy, and it’s simple and effective storytelling that Pixar does so well. It’s a nice, fun original animated film with enough heart to warm anyone up, hopefully, it gets enough people to notice it so it can work its magic on them too.
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