THB #718: Elio

This is going to be a SPOILER review because I can’t think of any other way to approach this film. It’s core ideas are the strength and the weakness of the movie and there is no point in trying to focus on the details (the trees) while avoiding the soul (the forest).

So…

Elio is a movie about an incredibly high-functioning child who has lost both of his parents in a car accident. This is actually the least of the spoilers, as it is established in the film in the first minutes.

Now, you say, isn’t every Disney. movie about the dead parent or parents?

And my answer is, “yes,” but with some details that require examination. Because there is a reason why classic Disney doesn’t translate well into the modern world, 50+ years after the magical originals. Disney’s take on what were ancient tales made sense in their time… but the idea of being saved in this millennium just isn’t the same as it once was.

In a case like Snow White, putting aside all the details of what was wrong with the 2025 movie of that story, the core problem was that Snow is really an object in the original Disney telling of the story. It’s in her name and the Magic Mirror’s words. She is defined by her beauty. Her loss of her home is due to her sexual power (which she doesn’t yet understand at all), left after the loss of her father with a competitive female guardian who clearly replaced Snow’s mother in the King’s life by way of the power of her beauty, and who is unwilling to compete with a youngster now more beautiful than her. Never mind than a lot of adult men - including Disney, if you go by how the 2 women were drawn - would much rather hook up with The Queen than the virgin beauty.

Snow lives with 7 dwarves, who are essentially emasculated, even if they recognize she is female. (You have to wonder what Doc might do if he could still get it up.) Her role is, for the most part, parental with a feminine touch that all 7 dwarves miss in their lives, even if they are intent on not allowing themselves to feel the void they live with. Their stories and their deeper reality as men, small but male, are really unexplored.

The prince, who is drawn with the least definition of all the main characters, is just a blank construct of young men and their desire for beauty (never admitting lust) as a way fo defining themselves.

The Magic Mirror, one of Disney’s gayest characters, hidden behind his deep voice (big balls!), obviously hates The Queen and has nothing much other than contempt for all the other players he encounters, as none of them appreciate how much more freedom they all have than he does, stuck in a mirror, to exist as a powerfully-knowledgeable Magic 8-Ball for his entire existence.

But I digress…

Snow White doesn’t belong in 2025. To adapt her - and man, did they struggle - you have to give up the core of what she is…. which is to say, the blandest of cheese, beautifully packaged. Disney had the idea when it made Enchanted, as the Disney princess of the past enters the modern era and everything is very, very different… but the ambition is that she tames the madness, not that the madness leads her to becoming a high-priced call girl.

The modern princess was defined, as it turns out, by Disney as well… in Tangled and Frozen. The core of Frozen is “sisters are doing it for themselves.” The details of the challenge - and the men - are not as important as the powerful bond between sisters, the “weaker” of them being more powerful in that she will not let the fear of her sister’s power - which stop the more powerful sister in her tracks - stop her from reconnecting.

Look at Pixar’s stories. Movie after movie about “the real inner spirit of creatures and objects whose lives you have never really experienced.” They are all just like us. Toys, Bugs, Monsters, Fish, Superheroes, Cars, Rats, Machines, Old People, The Voices Inside Our Heads. That core started changing with Brave, which is a hero movie, but with a young woman as the hero. The Good Dinosaur started with the mismatched team thing seen in other Pixar movies, but we had already heard from dinos and it flopped. Coco stepped back towards Pixar classics with a perspective from the side of the dead. By the time we got to Soul, it was just a story of a dude who died too soon. Luca was a kid who was also a sea monster. Turning Red was about girls getting their periods and women who know the drill all too well. Elemental took us back towards OG Pixar with a love story between elements.

The next film, Hoppers, has this logline: “An animal lover uses technology that places her consciousness into a robotic beaver to uncover mysteries within the animal world beyond her imagination.” Interesting… but the OG idea is that we just go into the world of whatever non-verbal group and the humans are just the side story.

As you can see… the Pixar Classic mode, now seen in sequel after sequel after sequel, has given way to story ideas… some better than others.

In a weird way, this is the same problem Disney is experiencing across their hugely successful series of brands… Star Wars needs to move on from the Skywalkers, Marvel needs to put the OG Avengers in the rear view, and yeah, it seem Pixar has run out of “inside the unknown world of X” ideas.

Thing is, there are a lot of brilliant people at Pixar and no one really wants to tell the same joke over and over again… or to admit that, to some degree, that is the core of your success.

Sidebar: The best new Pixar film that is not a Pixar film is Murderbot on AppleTV+. 100% for adults. But the show puts us inside the head of a killer/protective android whose reality is being interrupted by pesky humans.

Back to Elio…

The core challenge of the movie is that it is a movie about the period soon after a conscious, though pre-pubescent child is trying to recover from the instant loss of both of their parents. This is almost like a challenge that a bunch of animators came up with at the bar late on a weekend night after a lot of shots. Disney himself had the balls to kill Bambi’s mother during the movie, but holy fucking shit… BOTH PARENTS?!?!? And it’s 2025, not 1942, in the midst of WWII. People felt Bambi’s loss… but they didn’t talk about it. Dumbo lost his mother, but everyone chipped into get him flying on those ears and he was saved spiritually… can’t get away with that anymore.

So Elio is, from the start, a deeply sad movie. This little boy, practically unable to speak to his aunt, is desperate to escape to another world. He is stunningly capable of chasing his dream, however silly it may seem, as a child. But his chase, while accomplished is incredibly sad… a young boy, laying on a beach, asking to be abducted from the world in which he lives. There are adorable elements in the doing, but the gravity of the situation is working against the comfort to Elio and to the audience every step of the way.

So then he is brought into space and a world full of new and loving species. This brings joy to Elio and is we are along for that ride. And it is beautifully rendered.

But what is the point?

We know that there was a lot of drama in the making of this film at Pixar… to the point where a 3rd director and 2 more writers are given credit late in the post-feature credits. But I hve not read anyone who knows the story - that will someday be told - about what exactly was changed. So I can only really work from what is on the screen.

Elio’s experience in the “communiverse” is what they are selling in ads. I expect to see some pushback - though family audiences are forgiving - in the CinemaScore results because this fun section does not represent the entire experience of the movie. In the theater in which I saw the movie the 2nd time, a woman and her child left the movie even before Elio got to space… I wonder whether the family loss hit too close to home for mom.

But yeah… lots of interesting characters and voices. A representation of a universe of love and embrace.

And then, conflict. A warlord wants to join the group of peaceful allies. But he is rejected because he is not peaceful.

What does this have to do with Elio’s story? Nothing at this point.

Next, Elio lies - or extends what starts as a lie of omission - about his status on Earth to extend his connection to his newly found friends in the communiverse.

Okay… typical dramatic turn. Not off-putting. Unless you are still dealing with the core premise of this movie. Elio is trying to recover from the sudden loss of his parents. We have already seen him get himself into trouble while self-aggrandizing in his pursuit to get abducted by aliens. This extends this behavior. It is not unusual behavior for a character in an emotional spiral, grasping for connection. But is this journey actually moving Elio’s story forward?

So now Elio needs to solve the conflict with Lord Grigon and in an unbelievable turn that we forgive in an animated family movie, we meet Glordon.

I love Glordon. For me, he is one of the greatest animated characters of all time. He is, to the eye, a larval monster. He has no eyes. He shoots goop out of his butt. Etc. But he has the soul of a loving, gentle, funny child. Glorious.

And for the first time, Elio has a friend of equals. They have real fun together. They protect one another without question. Lovely relationship, even if the premise is that Elio needs Glordon as a bargaining chip.

When Elio realizes that handing Glordon over to his father, Lord Grigon, will hurt Glordon, he uses the DNA replication tool that was used to take his place on earth, so no one will miss him. The Elio replicant is “a perfect child,” which Elio resents, but he imagines that the replicant Glorgon will fulfill his father’s wishes as Fake Elio fulfills his aunt’s.

Meanwhile on earth, another brilliant little piece of filmmaking as Aunt Olga realizes something is up with her new, perfect Elio, and takes one hair to examine scientifically. The hair leaps off of the slide and returns to Fake Elio in a really great little sequence. The amount of character the animator gets out of one small string of hair… special.

Fake Glordon isn’t quite as effective as Fake Elio and glops out almost immediately, enraging Grigon and raising the threat to the communiverse to the extreme.

A bunch of action follows… and it’s fine… but the question at hand has not disappeared… what does all this have to do with Elio’s core journey?

The movie solves a variety of problems with the expertise that Pixar always brings to their communal and individual work. Elio learns that he can’t lie his way out of every problem, even if he is the smartest one in the room (until someone can read his mind). Elio realizes his aunt really loves him. Elio decides that there is no place like home because he doesn’t want to do to his aunt what his parents’ death did to him.

So the overall journey helps him mature a little. But we are still dealing with a young boy who has lost both parents. And that weight hangs over the movie until the very end. There is no real resolution.

Glordon and his father have a beautiful moment as Lord Grigon breaks out of his warrior suit to care for his child when in fear that his child will die. And Glordon admits to his father that he doesn’t want to follow in his footsteps as a warrior. Lovely.

But Elio still has no parent to tell his secrets to when he is scared of what is in front of him. He regains his aunt, yes. And that is a good Band-Aid. But it can’t fill that giant hole in his heart. And the movie - unlike Coco, for instance… and even Encanto with the re-discovery of Bruno and Mirabel finally discovering her power - doesn’t really acknowledge this.

Was there ever a version of this movie in which Elio was looking to the stars because he thought he could contact his parents “out there?” Was there a version in which he contacted his parents “out there” and comes to the realization that humans don’t belong “out there” and that he needed to return to earth to live his human life and that he would someday reunite with them “out there?” Probably not. But that is a movie that would have packed a wallop.

This is the frustration of Elio. There is some really incredible stuff in this movie. But the mountain it sets out for itself is so high that the big story at the center is never properly climbed. In the meanwhile, the sadness of Elio, which keeps showing itself in all kinds of indirect ways, is unsolved for. I don’t expect movie lovers - even pretty sophisticated ones - to go down this rabbit hole with me… trying to figure out why the pleasure and emotion one expect from Pixar isn’t fully realized here. And there is, as I wrote before, a lot of story that I don’t know that I therefore cannot mix into my analysis, even if you went there with me.

I love the idea that the movie tries to do a Local Hero ending, in a brief mid-credits sequence, establishing in an instant that Elio is making progress and has friends on earth now and that he is still in touch with Glordon. It doesn’t quite do what it seems to be after… it could be a matter of an edit of seconds… it could just need another line or two. But it’s an ambitious, not superfluous or sequel-focused sequence.

I wish I could say that Elio was solved. But it just isn’t. It’s not a disaster. It’s not a mess. It has some truly top-line work that feels more mature than most American animation.

“Well, anyway, my mission is finished. And what next? To return to Earth? Little by little everything will return to normal. I'll find new interests, new acquaintances, but I won't be able to devote all of myself to them.” - Lem, Gorenshteyn, Tarkovsky in Solaris

Until tomorrow…