Is there space for 'Elio'?

It's been 17 years since Pixar last went to space. Wall•E was a delightful little rom-com about a robot inadvertently saving humanity through the power of love. In that story, space is not the ultimate goal but an obstacle to overcome, not more than a very long, pretty highway to follow Eva, which eventually, accidentally, leads to saving the world. Whoops. In Elio, space is the destination. No ulterior motives, no planet-destroying events: Pixar’s latest is the story of a boy looking to the night sky for a friend, or as David Byrne, lead vocalist of Talking Heads sings as Elio (Yonas Kibreab) lies in the sand staring at the clouds, something to stop everything feeling the ‘same as it ever was’. The last time Pixar reached for the stars, they saved the planet; this time, they're trying to save a little boy.

Those could be the same thing, especially for Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who has been tasked with taking care of Elio after his parents’ sudden deaths. Expectedly, he’s a bit of a handful: skipping school, getting into fights, speaking his made-up language called Elionese, and sending out a voice message declaring himself leader of the planet to the Communiverse, a group of aliens eager to recruit an Earthling. Elio gets his long-term wish of finally getting abducted, and then gets thrust into a strange political dispute in which he must mediate a species of warmongering slugs (worms?), where he meets Glordon (Remy Edgerly). The two quickly become friends and have to figure out how to save the Communiverse and how to deal with their strict parents.

So ensues Elio’s attempt to run and hide amongst the stars, in all of their dazzlingly animated glory. Seriously, it’s kind of redundant to say that the latest Pixar release looks good, but I mean, look at this thing. Within the first five minutes of Elio in the space museum, lying on the floor with the fake stars running over his face, it’s easy to become mesmerised by the roundness, the fullness of the animation. If the similarities between this and Luca weren’t obvious enough in the look of the two main boys, then it’s clear in the startling level of detail and willingness to throw colours around. That first wide shot of the Communiverse evokes all the best parts of Spielbergian ‘WOW’ faces, and for an audience, it’s easy to become overwhelmed in it all as well. It’s utopic in every way, so Elio seemingly never wants to leave - he’s wanted.

Which is one of the many masterstrokes the movie plays with: that Elio is an accident, unwanted, to a degree. In one early scene, he listens to Olga talking to a friend on the phone, overwhelmed, about how she will ship him off to military school because this ‘isn’t the life she wanted’. Never in another Pixar movie, a studio known for themes of abandonment and loneliness, especially in their early work, which Elio so often reminds, has a child character come face to face with their worth like this. It’s startlingly mature. Depressingly bleak, and it makes sense why Elio would look to aliens to save him from a world where he doesn’t think he’s wanted.

Elio is another in a long list of triumphs for Pixar. Heartfelt, wonderfully bittersweet, and so easy to cry at, it’s a shame that it’ll likely lose money and get dumped on Disney+ early. Go see it, there’s space for it.