Images courtey of Disney/Pixar
ELIO— 3 STARS
LESSON #1: WE ALL HAVE THAT ONE FRIEND— If you psychoanalyze your social circle hard enough, I’m willing to bet you have one friend—maybe even a list of five going back to childhood before adult wisdom took over—who believes in aliens to an obsessive and borderline unhealthy degree. They, admittedly, are probably a little smarter than the rest of your tribe in the science department, or are at least inclined to do a little more research towards their truths, even if they are not universally held ones. Deep down, they might carry a wish to, someday, even be abducted by aliens, either in a freaky Fire in the Sky fashion or, even better, a funny Saturday Night Live-like situation. More often than not, no one believes or listens to those kids or friends. Elio says maybe we should have.
Lesson #1 is the prevailing identifying trait of the title character of this year’s Pixar summer film. Voiced by newcomer Yonas Kibreab, Elio Solis is a middle school boy who, from a young age, after wandering off in a space museum to hear the words of Carl Sagan and learn about the famed Golden Record on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, is obsessed with the search for extraterrestrial life. With quirks dialed to 11, including a DIY-crafted armored outfit and possessing the prized old school tech of a ham radio, Elio often ditches school to lie on beaches and rooftops every day, encircled with a message written in sand or lights asking to get abducted by aliens. He has no close friends, and after a skirmish with a classmate injures his eye, a conspicuous eyepatch bandage is added to the cut of this kid’s jib.
LESSON #2: CHILD LONELINESS AND GRIEF— A big part of Elio’s awful luck with interpersonal relationships is the grief he carries since his loving and understanding parents passed away some years ago. The trio of screenwriters—playwright and Turning Red co-writer Julia Cho, Soul co-writer Mike Jones, and a polish from Shotgun Wedding’s Mark Hammer—firmly present this sensitive state as a key source of conflict and a planted external talking point for the film’s family viewers. After the tragic loss, Elio was adopted by his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldana), a major in the U.S. Air Force working in a department focused on navigating satellites away from orbiting space junk. Single and career-oriented, Olga was never prepared to be a substitute parent, but is doing her best. Nevertheless, Elio’s sense of broken loneliness is off-the-charts, leading him down troublemaking paths which push away the love of his aunt. Her response is a summer boarding school camp, followed by likely enrollment there in the fall for the next school year.
On the cusp of that transition, singling out a surrender to parenting stress, Elio’s dream comes true when unseen aliens find the Golden Record on Voyager 1 and reply through a signal picked up by Olga’s debris management team. Hiding and watching the whole event, Elio sneaks in to answer the return message. True to far too many Pixar films, this is when the studio’s overused “Pixar Sprint” hurry-up gear engages the unnecessarily rushed part of the movie, where any substantial world-building ends and all of the whizzy gobbledygook and plot goals smear together. If the Pixar powers-that-be took their time, Elio could generate strong sequel potential with an endless universe of planets and creature races to explore.
Mistakenly labeled by the aliens as the top ambassador of his planet, Elio is whisked away to the Communiverse, a space-faring collective of leadership representatives from several galaxies. There, he learns the galactic utopian ropes and, as a way of earning full status to stay there, volunteers to broker a peace treaty with an imposing and warmongering race of armored slugs led by Lord Grigon (voice actor extraordinaire Brad Garrett). In a harebrained scheme, Elio apprehends Grigon’s meek son Glordon (fellow newcomer Remy Edgerly) as a bargaining chip.
LESSON #3: THE SENSE OF BELONGING— At this point, living it up at the Communiverse, Elio finds the second thing he’s always wanted: an equally lonely and odd kindred spirit. The adorable Glordon, like Elio, has a dearth of self-confidence and a desperation to belong. Established by a silly friendship montage of evolving secret handshakes and repeated puke pauses during their gravity-defying tomfoolery of spills and thrills, they become supportive buddies that heal each other’s sadness with dignity and acceptance, playing parallel to the membership reward Elio is seeking with the Communiverse. Naturally, the realization that a solid sense of belonging should start with family first is creeping up on the film’s climactic collision of planets and personalities.
While the aforementioned “Pixar Sprint” trope is alive and well in Elio and paced by Rob Simonsen’s wondrous musical score, so is the tried-and-true “Pixar Punch.” Despite the frenetic pace of most of the second and third acts, Elio knows the precise points to slow down, take a breath, and shift the emotional flow. A defiant line like “The only thing I want is you” demands tissues to be passed with it. In this movie, those moments are joined with one of the most innocent human gestures of bonding affection.
It’s the power of a hug.
LESSON #4: THE POWER OF A HUG— It’s that simple, and the animated form of that act echoes the same healthy outcomes of boosted support and reductions of fear, stress, pain, and heart rate. It’s not just who’s hugging whom. It’s also the audience that is watching such an affirming display, and the changes of thinking they encounter. Most importantly, it’s also when and why hugs are happening. Elio picks perfect spots and holds them dear, right when platonic embraces are needed most.
Despite decades of progress veering young men away from the selfish behaviors that become toxic masculinity, simple signs of affection like a hug are still shied away from or frowned upon too often with boys. Elio launches any sense of that discomfort or apprehension into a black hole. Hugging is appreciated and powerful in this movie. Continuing that progressive line of thinking built on hugs, Elio’s radiant display of friendship among boys is, far and away, the best quality of the entire film.
That theme counts as a special and rare occurrence from the Mouse House that sells more princesses than anything else. Sure, anyone is allowed to love princesses nowadays, and there have been classic and revered examples of male friendship like Woody and Buzz and Mike and Sully throughout Pixar’s history. But those are all grown adults, essentially, and those types of friendship hit differently. Joining 2021’s Luca and forgotten old classics like The Fox and the Hound, Elio carves a formative path with a more careful attitude for youths to observe and absorb that could not be more essential and relevant, especially with pre-teen boys. This is one for them, and the effort is welcome.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1314)
