Cinema from the Spectrum

It’s a Wednesday afternoon.

You get off work early, and your plans for the rest of the day involve a double feature at your local multiplex. You’re certain about one film that you want to knock off (that film in question being Celine Song’s latest film Materialists). It’s the other film, however, that you’re less certain about.

You ask yourself if you really feel like sitting through that How to Train Your Dragon live-action remake. You think long and hard about it. You know how you feel about those in practice (rarely are they as good as the original) and the reviews you’ve seen for this aren’t exactly swaying you to pull the trigger.

But you tell yourself that you can’t think that way. After all, you’re a budding film reviewer. You’re in a position where you – more or less – have to watch current releases you’re certain you won’t like. So, you stick with it. How to Train Your Dragon 2K25, then Materialists. Exactly in that order, since you want to avoid the potential children that could populate an evening screening of the former. You’re going to give it a fair shake, like you do many movies.

But then as you check showtimes, you notice that the new Pixar movie, Elio, is doing early access screenings that day. You didn’t even know it was opening that week. Even though your relationship to Pixar isn’t quite what it once was (to the point where you’ve skipped a handful of their 2020s output, including Soul and Turning Red, both considered high watermarks), you think about seeing that instead. Even if you don’t like it, you’ll probably get more out of an original Pixar movie (which seems like less of a certainty these days, given their recent reliance on sequels) than you would from a rehash of something you’ve seen more than a decade ago. At that moment, your plans change. An early access screening of Elio it is.

So, you grab those 3D glasses, you find your way into the theatre and sit comfortably in your seat, right in the middle (as you prefer). There’s only a few other people at this afternoon showing, only one of whom brought their children. “Reasonable enough,” you think.

After a handful of previews, the lights fully go down. The film finally begins. You watch closely as the film concerns itself around its titular protagonist, an 11-year-old orphan (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), trying to provoke an alien abduction just to feel less alone. You think the “dead parents” trope feels a bit stock for Pixar at this point, but the film handles that tenderly enough that you don’t mind. You also admire that the film isn’t afraid to make him a little annoying to those around him, including his aunt Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldana), who sacrificed her dreams to take care of Elio (much to his resentment). You think it doesn’t really need a bullying subplot to drive home its exploration of loneliness, but since it’s already seems more kid-friendly some of Pixar’s previous films, so why not, I suppose? It sure seems to be working on one of the kids in the audience (from what I gather from their audible reactions).

When Elio eventually gets abducted and the plot kicks into motion, you watch with intrigue as to how the film builds its outer world (known as the Communiverse). You like how this intergalactic metropolis looks itself, glittering and colourful. You dig how the alien are designed, distinctive enough in their strange appearances. You chuckle a bit when the Communiverse ambassadors mistake him as a leader of Earth, which thrusts him into a situation of worldly tensions he’s not wholly equipped for. You like the eventual friendship that forms between Elio and the alien Glordon (voiced by Remy Edgerly), whose dreams don’t align those of his warlord father Grigon (voiced by Brad Garrett), the film’s (sort of) villain.

You wish there were more time spent exploring any of it in a deeper way, but it seems more focused on getting through its premise, which seems to get busier and more formulaic as it goes along, introducing more that the studio has traversed before. At this point, you start to remember that the film got delayed by a year, with its original director (Coco’s Adrian Molina, who still retains his credit) leaving the production and being replaced by two other Pixar mainstays (Turning Red’s Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian, making her feature debut after her Oscar-nominated animated short Burrow). Granted, it’s tidier than you would think for a film that went through some big changes in leadership, but you do still feel these different authorial visions duelling with each other over how to tell this story, enough so that it ends up lacking a distinct one all its own.

But it’s cute enough that you can’t come down too hard on it. One moment near the end even makes you a little teary-eyed. So, you walk out of it knowing this is definitely mid-tier in terms of Pixar’s catalog, but because you didn’t have a ton in the way of expectations, your disappointment is lesser than it might’ve been. It’s fine. Not much more, not much less.

And as you wait for your next film, you just have to figure out how to write a whole review around that very feeling…

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Disney.

Directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina
Screenplay by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, Mike Jones
Produced by Mary Alice Drumm
Staring Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldaña, Remy Edgerly, Brandon Moon, Brad Garrett, Jameela Jamil
Premiere Date: June 10, 2025
Running Time: 98 minutes