Jonah Naplan   June 19, 2025

Pixar’s new movie “Elio” was marketed so little that its overwhelming mediocrity should be the least of the studio’s concerns this weekend. I saw it in a completely empty theater which wouldn’t normally be important, but it ironically parallels how the film, coming from the same creative team who made us emotionally attached to toys, monsters, fish, skeletons, and everyday people in their prior works, feels empty, emotionally and visually. It’s a hollow attempt to recreate the same magic contained in their heavyweight tear-jerkers such as “Coco,” “Soul,” and “Up,” and even some of their lightweights like “Wall-E,” “Onward,” and “Elemental.” Pixar has explored all of these central themes before in much better movies and their messaging here feels trotted out and tired, despite the film’s constant near-childlike energy that makes “Elio” come off as a mere fraction as thematically mature as its animated brethren.

Directed by Adrian Molina, Domee Shi, and Madeline Sharafian, working from a script by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones, the movie follows the title character (Yonas Kibreab), a spirited little boy obsessed with what lies beyond our planet in outer space. In what’s only assumed to be a freak accident, his parents died shortly before the film opens, and Elio is living with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) who clearly loves him and is trying her best as a surrogate parent but hasn’t quite gotten used to his hyper-activity.

Each day, Elio heads out to the beach, writing messages in the sand, begging to be abducted by aliens. He acquires communication equipment, wears a metal strainer on his head, and taps into radio lines, hoping to somehow forge an extra-terrestrial connection. He finally gets his chance when he secretly overhears Aunt Olga, who works at an Air Force base and dreams of being an astronaut, and her colleagues discussing the possible interception of one of the 1977 Voyager spacecrafts by aliens who’ve sent what seems to be an imperceptible message down to Earth. The whole group pushes it off as ridiculous, but Elio sneakily takes the opportunity to send an enthusiastic reply, resulting in him being, yes, abducted, in one of the movie’s finer visual sequences that takes him to the Communiverse, a society of some of the most powerful species in the entire galaxy.

Responding to his message, these aliens believe Elio is the ruler of Earth, a misunderstanding that he goes along with when the villainous emperor Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) threatens to destroy the Communiverse after being denied citizenship. Elio is sent to negotiate, but ends up becoming friends with Grigon’s energetic son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), an outcast who feels similarly astray from the rest of the world. They bond over parental conflicts and their struggles with loneliness, teasing that the movie will dive into something profound, but, alas, the themes remain frustratingly surface-level.

“Elio” plays a mean trick in the way it suggests it’s about to convey something truly meaningful about grief and dealing with the feeling that you don’t belong in your own home, but instead ends up verbally spelling out its themes to the audience without adding anything to the conversation that Pixar hasn’t already in previous movies. There’s little to write home about in regard to emotion, other than that it doesn’t come anywhere close to the heights that some of my favorites like “Inside Out” and “Toy Story 3” reached. It clearly wants to be a new classic, but doesn’t take any of the creative risks that Pixar classics did. The straightforward plotting and lack of twists and turns might actually make “Elio” one of the studio’s most predictable movies to date, despite its oddball concept.

Visually, the Communiverse also lacks the shimmer and shine of the Land of the Dead from “Coco” or Element City from “Elemental.” Where these other worlds looked detailed with imaginative personality, this one has a rounded, cartoonish edge to it that may appeal to the young ones in the audience but won’t catch the eye of the adults, and certainly didn’t catch mine. There’s a group of comic relief alien inhabitants who will be great material for “Elio” product placement but that I couldn’t individually name to you, let alone describe their importance to the plot. The humor, too, feels forced, relying too much on slapstick to create a kind of screwball spectacle that the Pixar of the past would surely scoff at.

“Elio” is by no means an awful movie. If it were produced by any other animation studio, it would seem a more commendable effort. But it’s being distributed by the top-of-the-line house in this artistic medium, so it’s worth being hard on it. The very fabric of what makes Pixar the studio we know and love is the way it communicates so many big emotions without ever speaking a word, through music, imagery, and complex characters. Though this movie’s ambitions reach for the stars, “Elio,” on the other hand, never manages to lift off.

Now playing in theaters.