“We have Lilo & Stitch at home…”
Lilo & Stitch at home is Elio.

A young boy, feeling frustrated and alone, ends up sending his own distress call into space. Surprisingly, his calls for salvation are answered, and adventure awaits.

From three Pixar directors (behind such movies as Coco, Turning Red, The Good Dinosaur) Elio is a high-speed, high-energy adventure. It is also… tonally weird and surprisingly bereft of emotional heft. Disney really didn’t do Elio any favours. Releasing it with little to no fanfare, the same time as Dreamworks’ live action How to Train Your Dragon and their own Lilo & Stitch live action remake. Elio was left drowning. I wanted to come to you with stirring words like: “Why would you go see derivative live action remakes when you could see originals like Elio!” Sadly, that isn’t to be…

We start out introducing Elio, whose parents have died due to classic Disney trope “not there anymore” syndrome. He is cared for by his late father’s career-driven sister, Olga (Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Zoe Saldana) who is a military officer working in a space defence capacity. She directs high orbit craft and space craft to avoid space debris, to be specific.
But Elio is mesmerized by the thought of alien life somewhere else. His loneliness spurs him on to seek out somewhere that wants him, since “no one wants him” on Earth. Surprisingly, he does make contact with aliens. The Communiverse (which is a weird name, now that I write it out) wants him to represent Earth. He accepts this massive responsibility and leaves Earth behind. But at what cost?

Elio‘s pacing is a mile-a-minute. This is perhaps the most key-jangling Pixar film I’ve ever seen. Which is gut-wrenching to say, because Elio’s beginning isn’t half bad. We have a narration from Star Trek alumni Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek: Voyager) describing the Voyager-1 probe. Big nerd out moment; there needs to be more movies about space. And in classic fashion, aliens do find Voyager-1.
His relationship with his aunt is stressed and awkward, powering his need to escape. But Olga’s frustrations are, naturally, from a place of love. She just can’t adjust to her new life yet; sacrificing a lot of her career to look after him.

Then the film goes into overdrive. Elio is thrust into an intergalactic community. Think the Spider-Verse Spider community but with way more neon and amorphous shapes. While these characters are easy on the eyes and have that Pixar standard of quality, we the audience don’t get to know them. We just run through everything like our feet are on fire. Who’s the floaty psychic alien? No time! We have… an intergalactic warlord to introduce?? And his fleet of evil ships?? Also the community can make perfect clones of people??

It goes on like this for over fifty minutes of its ninety minute runtime. Narrative tropes come and go. Liar reveals are used copiously. A chuckle or two do escape here and there, it is true. But usually in fleeting dialogue moments. There are also… bizarre tone shifts. There are a couple of scenes that are horror movie material. Impressively, these are Elio‘s strongest scenes. Pixar horror movie, when?

It is so strange that Disney would release Elio while their Lilo & Stitch remake is still in cinemas. They are virtually the same movie. Only Elio has none of the charisma, wicked comedy and heart that its predecessor has. In fact, Elio himself is… a bit of a jerk as a protagonist. I am a sentimental fool; I can cry at a movie when it wants me to. But this Pixar film did nothing for me. A lot of that stems from Elio as a character just being a bit too selfish. That, and the plot laying very little groundwork for me to care about him or his plight.

Geez, fairly lambasting it in this review. It is still a Pixar movie; it still has the great animation work and visual flair. The “horror” scenes are really really good, absurdly. But I should have been lapping this up, and I wasn’t. It was too fast and chaotic for its own good.