Elio Won’t Rescue Pixar From Its Artistic Slump

Life is so endlessly varied that a film studio could spend an eternity trying to encompass it all. But I do wonder if Pixar—long the standard bearer of American animation—may be reaching the bottom of its thematic barrel. The studio’s latest film, Elio (June 20), has all the lush and lively imagery one expects from the company. But the film’s effort to do the other Pixar trick—delivering a wistful, homespun treatise on some universal emotional matter—runs aground on all-too-familiar shores. Pixar has begun doing what it once seemed it never would: repeating itself.

The studio has sequelized many of their films: Toy Story, Cars, The Incredibles. But in a past era, those franchise exercises were balanced out by groundbreaking originals like Up and Wall-E. Now the IP reigns near totally, with enjoyable fresh standalone films like Luca and Turning Red relegated to the wilds of Disney+ during the pandemic. The programmatic original film Elemental did respectable box office in 2023, but it plays like an AI generator was prompted to mimic Golden Age Pixar. The studio seems in a rut, struggling to maintain its sterling reputation for ingenuity. Elio doesn’t do much to assist them out of that predicament.

The film—directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina; written by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones—concerns an 11-year-old boy, Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), who longs to be abducted by aliens. He lost his parents in some kind of accident, and is now being looked after by his aunt, Olga (a winsome Zoe Saldaña), who as near as I can tell works for the Space Force. Elio and Olga are at odds with one another. He finds it difficult to believe he’s not just a burden on her life; she finds it complex to connect with a kid who refuses to behave. Elio learns about the Voyager probe and becomes obsessed with the idea that his place might be out there in the stars, with unknown aliens who will understand him.

Film buffs will remember that Elio was played by Jodie Foster in the live-action version of this story. I’m joking, but Elio does bear some basic similarities to the great 1997 film Contact, in which a grieving daughter largely untethered to earthly matters turns to the cosmos in search of solace and connection. This is, sadly, not the only instance of Elio playing as a rehash of better things.

Through a hurried series of events, Elio finds himself whisked away to an alien utopia that’s part U.N., part Davos for extra special extraterrestrials. There are myriad wonders to savor in this glowing place: an sweeping fountain room that is revealed to be the bathroom, green goo that produces cheerful clones of anyone whose DNA it touches. I only wish that it wasn’t all introduced to us so hastily, that Elio gave us time to savor its elaborate design before forcing us into its perfunctory story.

But lessons must be learned. All too soon, Elio is squaring off against a bloodthirsty galactic warlord (who looks a lot like Lightyear villain Zurg) named Lord Grigon, voiced by an amusing Brad Garrett. Elio and Grigon’s timid and endearing son Glordon (Remy Edgerly)—one humanoid, the other a silk-spinning worm thing—form an unlikely friendship, defying the wishes of Glordon’s father, who plans for his boy to become a fearsome warrior. Glordon doesn’t want that life; he’s softer, sweeter. Y’know, different.

Here yet again is an example of Pixar walking up to a certain narrative line and then demurring, just as they did with Luca and Inside Out 2 and, one could argue, Brave. Queerness is limply implied, then scurried away from in favor of tedious, sweeping gestures. Elio urges its teenage viewers to embrace their difference, like so very many children’s movies have done before. Though I’m not sure sci-fi obsessed nerds really need that encouragement in 2025; at the moment, they’re kind of running the show.

And wait: didn’t Elio start as a story about grief? Why does it then morph into a half-baked celebration of one’s inner oddball? Those two themes needn’t be mutually exclusive, but Elio can’t quite get a grip on a central thesis and thus tosses bromides in multiple directions, hoping something will stick. I’d rather they’d just focused on the spacebound action, which is articulated with Pixar’s usual command of motion and momentum. Elio is a spirited, engaging 98 minutes. But its tired attempts at the gentle profundity of antique—that Wall-E wallop, that Up uplift—are emblematic of a studio that’s running out of ways to whimsically allegorize human experience. Alien experience, too.