The film is an American animated science fiction-adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios about the alien adventures of a young boy, who is beamed into space.
ELIO. Starring (by voice) Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Remy Edgerly, Brad Garrett, America Ferrera, and Shirley Henderson. Directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina. Rated PG (Mild themes and animated violence). 99min.
Review by Peter W Sheehan, Jesuit Media Australia
This film follows the adventures of an orphaned, eleven-year-old boy named Elio Solis, who by accident becomes an intergalactic ambassador of the planet Earth after being beamed into space. Elio bonds with alien lifeforms, as he attempts to understand their ways.
On Earth, Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic with a highly active imagination, and he is obsessed with alien beings. He is beamed up by mistake to Communiverse, an interplanetary organisation with representatives from galaxies that exist throughout the universe. They identify him as Earth’s leader and interact with him as Earth’s chief intergalactic ambassador. The film is replete with multiple characters and fantasy creations. Remy Edgerly voices Gordon, a worm-like alien whom Elio befriends, and Brad Garrett voices a worm-like alien warlord who is Gordon’s father. America Ferrera voices Elio’s beloved mother, Olga, who has passed away.
The film was conceived originally as a Coming-of-Age story about Elio, but is a big-screen comedy-misadventure which propels Elio into outer space. Pixar presents Outer Space in a translucent, luminous way that is attention-getting and characteristically Studio Pixar in design. While with the aliens, Elio forges a passage from loneliness in fresh ways that energise him, and he matures from a boy lacking in confidence to a person, who learns to live with and accept the loneliness of his past. Elio needs to find a place where he can “belong”, and he finds it.
Pixar embeds fantasy elements in the story in an experimental way, and exposes viewers to an extraordinary range of characters and situations. It powers the movie technologically by stressing vivid colours, extraordinary fantasy figures, and detailed textures. In doing so, the film avoids almost entirely soft environments and pastel colours that are much more typical of the animation techniques of Studio Ghibli. Pixar animation is richly coloured, vibrant, and confronting, and in this film it uses a complex narrative structure to communicate the scope of its animation.
Despite the excellence of the animation, the film poses some problems in the enormity of its narrative sweep, especially with respect to the subtle psychological insights that flowed more effortlessly and singularly in psychologically-inspired, fantasy films like “Up” (Pixar, 2009), and “The Red Turtle” (Studio Ghibli, 2016). Taking Elio from Earth to Outer Space and back again served to restructured the psychological thrust of the film somewhat distractingly. This is a very good Pixar movie, however, despite this. The quality of the animation stays indisputably Pixar all the way through, and continues to impress with its striking originality.
Peter W. Sheehan is an Associate of Jesuit Media