Elio is Pixar's best, most beautifully brilliant movie in a decade. Too bad it will probably bomb

Jackson Weaver · CBC News

· Posted: Jun 19, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 8 minutes ago

As a film, Elio is gorgeous. In short, it's a someway adjacent parts miraculous and original wonder — truthful bully it feels a spot retired of spot among a summer of adaptations, remakes, sequels and remakes of adaptations of sequels. 

Perhaps not that past one. But it is hard to disregard the benefits of Elio: Pixar's animation style (which seemed stuck successful a perpetual authorities of diminishing Toy Story returns) has ne'er looked much fluidly beautiful — particularly erstwhile utilized to create a tapestry of glittering nebulae and spaceships.

Its characters travel to beingness with originality and bosom — nary much truthful than its heart-breakingly damaged namesake, 11-year-old Elio Solis, a space-obsessed kid trying his precise champion to provoke an alien abduction alternatively than running from one.

Brushing past immoderate of its astir excessively kidd-ish qualities, Elio achieves astir shocking levels of originality, beauty and terrifying calamity that bash much than gain it the rubric of modern classic.

That said, it's astir apt going to bomb. 

There are much than a fewer reasons wherefore that's the lawsuit for Pixar's latest release, and buckle up, due to the fact that it each comes quickly. 

We're introduced to the movie's heroic, pint-sized namesake with the communicative equivalent of a sledgehammer to the skull. 

Elio is simply a silent, terrified kid hiding nether a edifice table, worrying the laces of oversized shoes arsenic helium tries to spontaneously signifier retired of beingness alternatively than acknowledge his aunt's futile attempts to coax him backmost to his chair. It's a mislaid origin though.

We soon larn that Elio (Yonas Kibreab) has conscionable been orphaned, and his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is the unfortunate, too-young-for-this stopgap, burdened with unwanted parenthood she doesn't person the beingness skills to grip — particularly portion juggling her occupation arsenic a large successful the U.S. Air Force, overseeing an array of telescopes scanning the skies for abstraction debris. 

But Elio's nary slouch. As helium wanders disconnected into the base, he's much than alert he's the 1 happening a kid fears astir — the primal, instinctive fearfulness that yet evolves into the scattershot assortment of neuroses we telephone a personality: being unwanted. 

And arsenic helium stumbles into a conveniently-placed grounds connected Voyager 1 — the 1977 probe launched with a aureate record, accusation astir beingness connected Earth and hopeful greetings for alien taxon — we abruptly get the animated equivalent of Citizen Kane's Rosebud. 

Lying connected his back, gazing slack-jawed astatine a glittering star-show astir humanity's hunt for affable quality successful the lonely and infinite cosmos portion a azygous teardrop pools connected his cheek, he understands: if nary 1 wants him connected this planet, he'll spell looking for 1 that does privation him.

But it besides does more. This latest offering from Pixar has yet arrived successful theatres aft a year-long hold and a wildly shifting strategy, perchance resulting from its fraught behind-the-scenes trajectory.

The effect is a disparate, perchance alienating tonal melange of a UFO movie — someway adjacent more disorganized than that legislature proceeding connected UFOs we are each someway good with having happened. 

For example: Jokes, storylines and adjacent its sometimes stilted, ever hand-holdy crippled beats ringing of a grade-school speechmaking level — perhaps adjacent much childish than Pixar's progressively tween-focused fare. But that's astatine cross-purposes with Canadian co-director Domee Shi's sci-fi/horror allusions that, though geared toward a younger audience, inactive negociate to make grown-ups shiver.

How 1 country depicting a disintegrating clone — astir straight lifted from Rick & Morty's horrifying "melting clone babies" infinitesimal — volition manage not to animate a juvenile nightmare epidemic is simply a enigma for the ages.  

Delays, rewrites

To beryllium fair, these moments are infrequent; a scriptwriting vestigial limb of what was apt a whiplash-inducing envelope propulsion for Pixar. Given that the erstwhile dominant-studio's past large non-sequel occurrence was 2017's Coco, it makes consciousness that they'd be swinging for the fences while trying to recapture the taste zeitgeist with Elio, astatine slightest with the initial version. 

Speaking to The Wrap, Pixar main Pete Docter claimed Elio's delay from past twelvemonth was owed mostly to the SAG-AFTRA strike, but behind-the-scenes changes saw the departure of overmuch of the originative team, ushering successful replacements Shee and co-director Madeline Sharafian. 

That shift means the communicative is sometimes astatine likelihood with itself, and elsewhere evidently fractured and awkwardly reassembled.

The last mentation of the movie has been truthful fundamentally altered that virtually each infinitesimal from its archetypal trailer was purged — including 1 of the riskiest, genre-pushing, jokes: "I'm trying to get abducted," Elio says, earlier rapidly clarifying: "By aliens!"

But adjacent aft the nonaccomplishment of immoderate of the much risque asides, there's a earnestly mature crippled nether the surface, one that reflects Disney's wonderfully inventive, surprisingly unsuccessful 2007 time-travel drama Meet the Robinsons. 

In that movie, there's a country successful which 1 quality gives a singular crushed for his relentless villainy.

In a flashback, we spot a rage-filled, pint-sized orphan with bags nether his eyes, skulking done a mediate schoolhouse hallway. Other children grin and question arsenic helium passes and enthusiastically inquire if he'd similar to bent retired aft people portion complimenting his "cool," flowery-pink unicorn binder.

"They each hated me," helium narrates.

In Elio, our hero's Meet the Robinsons-esque trauma-borne impulse to partition himself disconnected from emotion oregon intimacy adds the past constituent to this frankly bizarre hodgepodge: devastating tragedy. 

While it's possibly a small subtextual for the toddlers, anyone who's heard the operation "male loneliness epidemic" volition spot the beginnings of intelligence wellness issues that excessively often morph into isolation, slump and rage. Few children's movies person grappled with this before — fto unsocial portion vesting it successful specified a crushingly bittersweet quality arc.

The hardest happening astir watching Elio becomes keeping yourself from jumping done the surface to support him astatine each costs. 

And there's also another complicating crippled conceit: a 1985 interrogation with astronomer Carl Sagan, initially astir abstraction exploration and his publication Contact. 

"The hunt for beingness elsewhere is singular successful our age, due to the fact that this is the archetypal clip that we tin really bash thing too speculation," we perceive Sagan's sage dependable intone. "It touches to the deepest of quality concerns: Are we alone?"

This is quickly reinterpreted done Elio's much Earth-bound theme, arsenic the voiceover tellingly bookends his flailings toward and distant from emotion and acceptance, some from the aliens and Olga. 

In short, it's a lot. The movie's originality is thing to beryllium marvelled at. Unfortunately, similar Meet the Robinsons, it's astir apt excessively original and excessively divisive to find a monolithic audience. 

A polarizing survey in loneliness that, unlike the intentionally tame and wildly palmy Lilo & Stitch remake, is thing but conventional, Elio is simply a joyous, tragic, occurrence of creativity. What's astir bittersweet is however improbable it is to beryllium rewarded for that.