Should we be sad that the films of Pixar are no longer cutting through as once they did, or is that exactly the kind of sentimental attachment our new tech-bro overlords rely on? The studio has at least had a good, profitable thirty-year run, from the first Toy Story back in 1995 to last year's Inside Out 2. It's just a little bittersweet that they should now be ceding the multiplex space to live-action remakes of animated favourites: the processor chips that generated three decades' worth of original entertainment have been surpassed in their pull and power by something more algorithmic. Elio, presently doing steady business after a perilously slow launch in a marketplace dominated by the Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon redos, could reportedly have been more original yet. Initially conceived and pitched as a coming-out story of sorts, it was toned down even before last November's election result over concerns about the America the film would be releasing into. (The pivot led to the departure of original director Adrian Molina, and some scattered "directed by" credits in the release cut: Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi upfront, Molina tucked away in the closing scroll.) Something of that initial premise persists, intriguingly enough, but the version we get hinges on a sullen pre-teen outcast (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), being raised by an aunt after the death of his parents, who experiences a close encounter of the third kind. (Hey, if our animated features are having their data scraped by live-action producers, why not the other way around?) A space nut, young Elio spends his days and nights alone on a beach adjacent to his aunt's asteroid-tracking military base, hoping that aliens will abduct him; the S.O.Ses he scrawls in the sand read like deviance from a tight-lipped militaristic norm that denies or doesn't know how to handle any feelings. Packed off to summer camp in the hope it'll straighten him out, Elio is subsequently rescued from bullies by extraterrestrial means. The film, in other words, can itself claim to have been straightened out, yet its narrative arc - solitary refusenik negotiates their place in the world, finding solidarity and relief among a community other than the one they've been born into, becoming more comfortable in their own skin - is unalterably queer: swap the tractor beams and constellations for a nightclub's mirrorball, and we could almost be rewatching the BBC's recent adaptation of Paris Lees' memoir What It Feels Like for a Girl.
Compared to the bulk of the digimations following in Buzz Lightyear's moonbooted footsteps, Elio is at the very least well made, more WALL-E than Planet 51, and identifiably Pixarian in its fealty to a multilayered, well-tempered screenplay. The wide-eyed wonder inspired by the details of NASA's Voyager probe (seized upon here as a means of connecting Elio to his new hosts) is one launchpad; if the pastel spacescapes strike the eye as slightly rote, paling in comparison with the vivid phosphorescence of Disney's semi-forgotten post-Covid flop Strange Planet, the character design is always sharp (the aliens include giant bugs who talk out of their butts and strap themselves into flesh-piercing armour to persuade as warriors) and there are fun asides, like the list of items Elio packs for his intergalactic mission ("nice, peaceful spoooons!"). A clever subplot involving an Elio clone ("what's my motivation?") sent back to Earth while our hero is on his space adventure is plainly Pixar attempting to reassure those accompanying adults in the audience who'd go spare if any of their own charges went missing, but it also results in a story strand that yields several laughs, a properly emotional reunion on a beach at dusk, and an image that wouldn't entirely look out of place in a David Cronenberg movie (the clone melting away with a thumbs-up and a friendly wink once he's been deemed surplus to requirements). We can probably say that Pixar's Golden Age - roughly 1995 to 2015, an era when the company treated digimation as sport, routinely besting their rivals in a run of must-see films that pushed the artform forwards - is behind us. Yet this new, mellower era has freed these animators to pursue other textures and tones, to throw off their hard corporate exoskeleton and embrace their inner softies (as with those alien bugs), feeding any behind-the-scenes insecurities back into their plots. (They were surely there in the Inside Out films' button-pushing, as it is in Elio's mini-identity crisis.) Even in this compromised state, Elio makes for a pleasing summer getaway, but in a moment when the NASA budget has been slashed by a Government suspicious of the alien and marginal, it also presents as a poignant pop-cultural wormhole connecting our world to an alternative reality: a glimpse of a better, kinder galaxy where higher powers look out for the troubled, using technology only for good.
Elio is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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