In a developed world of plunging birth rates, here’s Elio, a Pixar animation for sad only children. An ET-flavoured tale flipped on its head and with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the mix, it also doffs its hat to the era of Big Science, when the likes of Professor Carl Sagan were still being listened to rather than shouted out of the room.
“Are we alone,” the disembodied voice of Sagan intones several times throughout the film, meaning is Earth the only planet in the universe harbouring sentient life? “Alone,” taken literally in the case of Elio, an orphaned kid being brought up by his aunt, Olga, who has given up her dreams of being an astronaut to raise her dead sister’s child. Perhaps Olga’s dream has mutated on its way to Elio, perhaps he’s just hoping his parents are still alive somewhere out there, but what Elio wants more than anything else in the world is to be abducted by aliens.
And then one day it happens. Mistaking him for the leader of planet Earth, the aliens whisk him away for an extra-terrestrial adventure. On the one side the Communiverse, a “pangalactic organisation of the advanced species of the cosmos”, as one of its benign representatives puts it. On the other, Grigon “Blood Emperor of Hylurg” – not a creature to be trifled with. Plus Glordon, son of Grigon, who has no interest whatsoever in following his father into the war business.
In snappily written scenes not overdoing the cute, loner Elio and only child Glordon form a bond. Much of the rest of the film hinges on it. It’s a gay one, potentially at any rate, though Pixar apparently scaled all that back as the movie was being developed. From this aged cynic’s point of view, I’m glad they did. Is there really any need to make big points about difference and diversity when almost every creature in a movie is radically different from all the others to start with?
The Douglas Adams stuff, where every extra-terrestrial development is treated as a bother – sigh fi? – comes in the shape of the Communiverse’s Universal Users Manual, a Hitchhiker’s Guide by another name, which has smartass answers to most of the questions about life, the Universe and everything.
The terminally unfashionable Enid Blyton used to write stories about the adventures kids got up to while their parents were absent and that’s what’s going on here – a Famous Five or Secret Seven yarm, but up in space and with just a solitary kid doing the adventuring. Those falling birth rates.
So, for kids? Yes, but the voice cast (Yonas Kibreab as Elio, Zoe Saldaña as Olga, Remy Edgerly as Glordon) give it more nuance than you might think and behind it all lies a lament for the grand era of ambitious space exploration. The Voyager space probe was launched in 1977 (the year of Close Encounters of the Third Kind) with the explicit Star Trek-ian mission of communicating with the rest of the Universe. Voyager gets several mentions, and, checking Wikipedia as I write, it appears to be still out there, 25 billion kilometres from the Earth, and still transmitting data.
Talking of gosh wow, Pixar’s animation remains fantastic, though these days that’s just a given. Special care has been paid to light effects in Elio but even so this looks in many respects like the Pixar we have come to know. Pixar Reality, as served up in Toy Story, Finding Nemo or Monsters, Inc. It’s now part of the culture. So it’s nice to see the animators occasionally slipping the leash and letting their hair down, most obviously when Elio is first lifted heavenwards by the aliens. Proper gosh wow.
Thoughtful rather than knock-your-socks-off thrilling, all in all this is an interesting case of a movie whose main protagonist also seems to be its intended audience.
Ellio – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
