After Coco and Encanto, Elio is the third Pixar movie in the last eight years pitched at Spanish-speaking audiences, and if it is the least of those, it deserves to be mentioned alongside them. What’s frustrating is that it comes so close to greatness, or at least really goodness. However, it spends enough time headed to that place to warrant the ticket prices for you and your child.
Elio Solís (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is an 11-year-old boy who has been orphaned and is now in the care of his Aunt Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña), a U.S. Air Force major who has had to put her astronaut training on hold for her family obligations. With Olga having no idea how to take care of a kid and trying to send him to summer camp, it’s no wonder that Elio not only dreams of being abducted by aliens, he spends hours on the beach staring at the sky and drawing large signs begging the little green men to come and get him.
This opening section pairs intriguingly with Watch the Skies, the Swedish movie that played in North Texas theaters for a flicker earlier this spring. Most of the attention around it was about its new AI-assisted method of dubbing its dialogue into English, but it was as sharp as this movie about the loneliness and alienation (ooh, sorry) that drives people to give up on Earth and direct their hope toward extraterrestrial beings who are better and more enlightened than humans. Elio is a social outcast at school for his obsession with aliens, and he acquires a black eye and gets kicked out of camp after he assaults a couple of bullies who bring up his dead parents.
The movie could have profitably spent more time with this part of the story, but a new set of pleasures kicks in once Elio is actually abducted by aliens who assume that he’s Earth’s leader. The Communiverse, a giant spaceship transporting all the ambassadors from different worlds, is a sight to see, with invisible walls, clouds of pink smoke, and the differently shaped creatures going around on levitating platforms. When a brutish warlord in an armored space suit (voiced by Brad Garrett) threatens the Communiverse, Elio strikes up an interesting friendship with the warlord’s son Glordon (voiced by Remy Edgerly), a worm-like purple alien who doesn’t want his own space suit because he doesn’t want to spend his life vaporizing planets.
Meanwhile, the Communiverse creates a changeling version of Elio and places it on Earth to avoid attracting attention, and the other Elio is so considerate and uninterested in space aliens that Olga becomes suspicious, not least because she’s also seeing some weird readings at her job monitoring space debris. It leads to a horrifying gag where she discovers the truth about the other Elio while he’s sleeping. As usual, the Pixar sense of humor keeps everything light, and the newcomer Kibreab delivers on everything that the two roles require, including making the other Elio into something funny. (Between this and 28 Years Later, this is a great week for performances by prepubescent boys.)
Alas, the movie definitively loses its mojo during the final third, when the Elios and Olga have to avert intergalactic war by giving Glordon back to his father. This is where Pixar’s customary heart-tugging stops working and the story bogs down while it’s switching back and forth between Earth and the Communiverse. This film has three directors (including Coco’s Adrian Molina and Turning Red’s Domee Shi), and maybe that old saying about too many cooks applies here. Even so, this original story will repay your child’s attention way better than the live-action remakes of How to Train Your Dragon or Lilo & Stitch do. We’re some years removed from the days when every Pixar release was an event, but the studio is still more than capable of turning out something worthy.
Elio
Voices by Yonas Kibreab and Zoe Saldaña. Directed by Adrian Molina, Domee Shi, and Madeline Sharafian. Written by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones. Rated PG.
