Elio (2025)

In a dazzling Pixar universe, a solitary boy stands between two powerful forces

The lonely boy longing to be beamed up to a welcoming universe he hopes to call home

Elio (2025)

In theaters

I haven’t seen any of Pixar Studio’s productions since the enchanting Finding Nemo (2003), so for me this was a fresh immersion into their brand of fluid, eye-popping animation. Twenty-two years later, I was again impressed by their painstaking attention to detail.

This story’s human characters feel loose-limbed and recognizably vulnerable. Its creatures from galaxies far away remain fascinatingly just out of reach. Bridging the divide between an 11-year-old kid’s commonplace needs and his wildest imaginings kept the thrills coming.

Elio Solis (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), the dreamer at the center of the action, took hold of me. Maybe we all once might have been like him (and at moments still might be).

Kids will easily identify with Elio’s aching belief that he doesn’t fit in anywhere. We adults, too, can sometimes peer into the night sky and yearn to flee bothersome Earth to leap up to the stars.

Elio looks to the heavens to ease his sadness: How happy I would be if aliens abducted me!

Planet Earth has dealt him a tough blow. Since losing both parents, he’s struggled to find solace after moving to a military base to live with his caring aunt, Major Olga Solis (Zoe Saldaña). She tries, in vain, to get Elio to befriend other kids.

She’s a space research scientist and hopes to be an astronaut, so she sympathizes with her nephew’s dreaming big. But she explains to Elio that outer space isn’t where to find the cure for his oh so earthbound loneliness.

That’s as much as she knows, grumbles Elio to himself. Imagine his joy when a galactic league of alien civilizations called the Communiverse reaches out to humanity and Olga’s research team picks up the signal.

Elio, using only a ham radio, intercepts the message and giddily responds: Yes, yes, he wants to establish contact! He doesn’t realize that he’s the only earthling to actually enter into this historic intergalactic conversation.

When the Communiverse beams him up to their realm he’s forced to misrepresent himself as Earth’s leader.

Which pits him against the Hylurgian, a warmongering species that the peace-loving Communiverse refuses to admit to its ranks. The Hylurgian’s tyrannical Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) demands admission, or he’ll obliterate the Communiverse.

While Elio, delighted to be among the strange, utterly un-earthlike creatures of the candy-colored Communiverse, feels at home like never before. So, he rashly volunteers to negotiate with Grigon, without a clue about how to bring peace between adversaries.

In a hasty strategic move, he befriends the innocent Glordon (Remy Edgerly), a sweet worm-like kid who’s a son of Lord Grigon and doesn’t want to adopt his warlord father’s cruel belligerence.

Glordon and Elio team up to fight for a community threated by the evil Lord Grigon

Pixar’s animators have crafted a benign, strangely compelling assortment of outer space creatures in the Communiverse. Their frictionless harmony feels wondrous, trippy, liberating.

These fantastically designed galactic creatures, neither animal- nor human-like, feel potently otherworldly. They dart, swirl and giggle with a serenity that seems just beyond our human grasp, supremely mega.

They twinkle. There’s a wise creature seemingly made of stone, a harmless stingray lookalike, an eyeglass-wearing insect and a device with a screen for a face surrounded by illuminated bubbles that express its feelings.

Speaking for this outer space Camelot with quiet dignity is one of its most eloquent ambassadors, Questa, a pink, wispily elegant diplomat whose tendrils have a calming touch, warmly voiced by Jemeela Jalil.

Against Grigon’s threats Questa advocates for the Communiverse and its principles. She insists that they’re gentle, peace-loving believers in tolerance who nevertheless won’t be pushed around.

That steel mixed with beneficence is precisely what the warrior Lord Grigon can’t understand. The Communiverse fears his malice will corrupt their peaceable ways, so they refuse to let him join them.

Either reverse that decision, the enraged Grigon roars back at them, or he’ll wipe them out.

To defeat this intractable evil, Elio enlists the sweetly clueless Glordon. Interestingly, the cuddly slug is misunderstood by his father in a way that mirrors the bewilderment of Elio’s exasperated aunt. In their emotional isolation these two very different life forms aren’t such an odd couple.

Elio is unabashedly a kid’s picture, with vividly carefree characters shimmering and smiling across a distant heaven.

But the inspiration for the movie grows out of our real world’s unanswered mysteries.

The script looks to what astronomer Carl Sagan (whose voice is heard on the soundtrack) called the deepest of human concerns: Are we alone? That’s an enormous question for a kid’s movie, but it keeps the action moving and its visual marvels will hook adults, too.

The meticulous voice work pins down the emotions that underlie the swirling animation. Kibreab speaks with a spunkiness that’s likeable yet shows at the same time that brash young Elio is in way over his head.

The dreamy boy had only imagined the universe before discovers that in fact it’s really big. Watching him squirm under the scale of the trouble he’s in makes for a delightful adventure.

Garrett’s growling menace as Grigon is comically over the top, so we quickly let ourselves wonder if Elio might bring this meanie down a peg or two.

The brutal Grigon threatens to destroy the Communiverse unless they let him join them

Saldaña thoughtfully mixes Olga’s concern and affection for her nephew. Edgerly is endearing as the hapless Glordon, who isn’t sure he can find the courage to speak truth to his powerful father.

Jalil as Questa gives the most resonant vocal performance. The actress calmly invokes a regal wisdom that seeks to quell dissension. Questa understands that violent threats are best beaten back with patience, not by ramping up still more aggression.

For me this movie was an exciting introduction to what’s apparently a cornerstone in Pixar’s ethos: practice tolerance and put in the hard work that lasting understanding demands.

What Elio brings to the audience, I think, is the possibility that kids who see it might soak up at least a hint of its very grown-up plea for peace. Visually the picture breezily glides by on the fervent wish that harmony, given a chance, can come to pass.

It’s true that we adults looking on remain, when it comes to peacemaking, a work in progress. But this movie’s zippiness might help to move that needle, too.