By Jake Wilson
ELIO
★★★½
PG. 98 minutes
Child meets alien: it’s a tale as old as time, or at least a formula that goes back to E.T. Still, given that Disney and Pixar are two branches of the same company, there’s something disconcerting about Pixar releasing Elio just a few weeks after Disney brought us the live-action version of Lilo & Stitch.
Elio and his alien friend Glordon.Credit: PIXAR
Both films centre on a rambunctious young orphan who has trouble making human friends, but does better when extra-terrestrials are involved – and both incorporate the expected heart-tugging moments and moral lessons, along with parodies of science-fiction cliches.
So which one should you or your children see? It’s a matter of individual preference, but personally I’d have to give Elio the edge.
Lilo & Stitch is mostly old-fashioned slapstick, though not lacking in charm. Elio is more ambitious, and also a whole lot weirder – which is a plus, though questions might be raised about the advisability of showing a child lying on a beach next to a message scrawled in the sand that reads “ABDUCT ME,” granting he’s spelled out he wants to be abducted by aliens, not just anyone.
At any rate, it isn’t long before young Elio (Yonas Kibreab) gets his wish. Light years away from planet Earth, he seems to have found his chosen family in a non-violent, technologically advanced collective of aliens known as the Communiverse, who accept and appreciate him as his well-meaning aunt back home (Zoe Saldana) never could.
Naturally, there are complications. It’s not that the members of the Communiverse are hiding anything sinister, but they’ve jumped to the false conclusion that Elio is Earth’s leader.
Rather than confess the humiliating truth, he volunteers for a dangerous diplomatic mission involving the monstrous Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) – whose young son Glorgan (Remy Edgerly) proves to be even more of a misfit than Elio, with no true desire to move on from his larval form or join the family business of galactic conquest.
Credited to three directors, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina, Elio feels more like a corporate product gone slightly haywire than the vision of any particular individual. But it’s inventively animated and neatly plotted in a way that used to be a Pixar hallmark: the surprises are many, both in one-off sight gags and larger twists.
Elio is an especially intriguing cultural object for adults who have followed the reports of behind-the-scenes disputes over the representation of gender in Disney and Pixar movies, as with the fleeting same-sex kiss apparently cut from the 2022 Lightyear then reinstated.
For anyone familiar with this history, it’s hard to avoid viewing Glorgon’s whole subplot as a metaphor for gender non-conformity. For his species, growing up means entering into a “carapace,” a hard outer shell masking inconveniently squishy feelings.
Elsewhere in the film, the theme is echoed in ways that feel sometimes conscious and sometimes less so – including the revelations about what alien bodies are capable of, as well as Elio’s sense of his own difference. But there’s no reason any of this should trouble kids.
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