ELIO - Mark Reviews Movies

Elio, Disney / Pixar

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 19, 2025

There's enough imagination and more than enough heart to Elio to compensate for the fact that its story is ultimately too formulaic and confused. Who needs a novel or sturdy plot, though, when directors Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina, along with those always-talented artists at Pixar, bring us alien life and worlds that look, well, alien? If there life out there in the grand and unknowable expanse of the cosmos, how boring and disappointing would it be if, as in so much science fiction, those other species just looked broadly human or humanoid, only with brightly colorful skin or scales or some additional cosmetic alterations?

The otherworldly creatures of this computer-animated film are a various and eclectic bunch, which is exactly as our eponymous protagonist, an 11-year-old boy with dreams of meeting alien life, would probably hope they would be. In its best moments, the film reflects the imagination of a child, and that isn't something to dismiss so easily, simply because a film's plot is so routine.

Then, there is that other element for which Pixar is well-known, and it's the fact that this story so effortlessly tugs on the heartstrings with almost surgical precision. Take the introduction to Elio (voice of Yonas Kibreab), whose parents have died and who is now being raised by his paternal aunt Olga (voice of Zoe Saldaña).

The aunt, an officer in the Air Force who tracks space debris and once had plans of becoming an astronaut until tragedy struck her family, brings the boy to a space museum. He sneaks into an unfinished exhibit about the Voyager program. That's the one that sent probes into deep space with golden records containing various sounds of Earth and its inhabitants.

For Elio, though, looking up at a large model of the solar system and a light show presenting an endless field of stars gives him the idea that, on some cosmic level at least, there's a possibility that he isn't as alone as he feels right now. The kid wins us over immediately.

From then on, Elio spends his days trying to make contact with aliens—skipping school, sneaking away to a beach, using a ham radio with its antenna pointed straight at the sky to send and listen for messages to and coming from space. One night, he actually hears something, and sure enough, his aunt is called into an emergency meeting in which a more skilled radio operator with far more expensive equipment has heard the same signal. Elio responds to the signal, lying that he's the leader of Earth in the hopes that aliens are listening and will finally take him away.

They are, and after some business with at a sleepaway camp and Olga's frustrations making the boy believe she doesn't want him in her life, they do. That's when the film finds its footing.

There are sights and wonders here—from the spinning planet-like sphere where species from around universe congregate to create and share new technology, to the varied types of aliens that include a mind-reading ray-like being and a geometric rock creature and a liquid supercomputer, to their assorted inventions. A joke here is that even toilets, pillars that look like floating waterfalls, in this place are spectacular, and the reality is that they are, because the filmmakers haven't skimped on any details.

The screenplay (written by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones) does, unfortunately, as we're introduced to a mostly generic villain, a galactic warlord named Grigon (voice of Brad Garrett) who wants to be admitted into this group and threatens to destroy the place when he isn't, and a seemingly ambling plot. It has Elio, who wants to prove his worth to the aliens, attempting to negotiate with Grigon, being imprisoned when that fails, befriending the warrior's pacifist son Glordon (voice of Remy Edgerly), using the young worm-like being as a bargaining chip, and on and on it goes. Some stories create characters and worlds that feel like enough to simply explore on their own merits and terms, and this is definitely one of them.

Even so, the emotional core of these characters and what's beneath the surface of the plot remains strong. Elio is just a lonely kid whose life only makes him wonder if he really is alone and if there's something about them that's the reason for that. Olga, who is presented a cloned substitute of her nephew to keep Elio's interstellar travel a secret, is wrestling with her new responsibilities as a guardian, knowing she has to sacrifice her old dreams, and feeling as if she's not cut out for her new role, and the wormy Glordon has some heft of character underneath the odd cuteness of his appearance. He's certain he'll disappoint his father if he tells Grigon the truth about not wanting to become a warrior, and that's a very lonely place to be, as well.

It might be too easy, perhaps, to take for granted what Elio does accomplish in terms of its multifaceted design elements, the sheer craft of its animation, and the grounded, universal fears and longings represented by its characters (It helps that the film uses archival audio of Carl Sagan to sum those up on a cosmic level for us). That the film packs an emotional punch, in spite of its unnecessarily convoluted plotting, lets us know that it gets enough right in the right ways.

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