Pixar’s ‘Elio’ delivers cosmic adventure and heartfelt connections

When Elio, a space fanatic with an active imagination and a huge alien obsession, is beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary organisation with representatives from galaxies far and wide, he must form new bonds with eccentric alien lifeforms. Photo / Pixar

If a movie is a bowl of breakfast cereal, Elio is Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and the audience is Calvin. The title hero is a Calvin, too: a hyper-imaginative orphaned boy who lives with an aunt and is desperate for the universe to send aliens to take him away from it all. This being Pixar, the universe obliges.

And this being Pixar, the journey is a visual rapture with a tale of loneliness and reconnection tucked inside it, told at the speed of light. Elio isn’t up there with the animation house’s finest work - the glory days have been over for some time now - but it’s a fine, fizzy piece of family entertainment, overfamiliar in spots (if a story about multiple species of extraterrestrials can be called familiar) but just as overeager to please.

Aunt Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña) is a major in the Air Force with a job protecting satellites by monitoring nearby space debris; she wanted to be an astronaut, but the death of Elio’s parents in an unspecified misadventure has put the dream on hold.

She’s loving toward the boy but overwhelmed and exhausted, and the script by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones makes clear why: Voiced by Yonas Kibreab, the kid’s a handful, impressed by the story of the 1977 Voyager space mission - the one with the little gold record of Earth’s languages and Chuck Berry songs that will hopefully convince aliens we’re intelligent - and obsessed with being rescued from his misery by getting abducted by ETs.

He’s a weirdo, a misfit and a brainiac, but he’s also a revved-up little boy, and the movie’s troika of directors (Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi) pitch his story at us with the energy of a toddler bouncing off the walls before a nap.

Through a series of plot contortions that would beggar belief if they didn’t come at us so fast, Elio is whisked up into the belly of a mother ship for a meeting with not one alien race but representatives of many races - a “Communiverse” of the extraterrestrial best and brightest.

They offer the boy a place among them, believing him to be the leader of Earth. Given the grown children currently running the planet, we could do worse.

The concept of all those different kinds of aliens frees the Pixar elves to be as creative as we know they can be, and Elio’s greeting committee on the spaceship - itself a lovely conch-shaped creation - is a flamboyance of visual design: Here a frilly, mind-reading celery stalk; there a pugnacious blob; there a concatenation of rocks. A little floating blue orb named Ooooo, voiced by the invaluable Shirley Henderson, is a water-based supercomputer; an airborne infinity-symbol of pages is a sentient encyclopedia.

And because every movie needs a villain, here’s Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), a clanking super-soldier from the Crab Nebula who vows to destroy any Communiverse he can’t join.

“Elio” ramps up its busy plot until the movie’s spinning like a top, but the most affecting scenes involve the hero’s friendship with Lord Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), a sort of toothy, outsize water bear with a far gentler disposition than his dad. Both he and Elio are alienated, for lack of a better word, and their connection is sweet and funny and resonant amid all the clamor.

Despite a few scary bits, Elio is suitable for all ages including parents, but the Pixar faithful (of which this critic is one) may notice a sameness creeping into the studio’s fanciful otherworlds.

The Communiverse in all its spacious splendor is visually similar to the brain-scape of Inside Out, the bardo of Soul, the water world of Luca and other Pixar creations, an outlier being the Day-Glo Day of the Dead afterlife of 2017’s Coco. (It’s worth noting that the movie itself is the product of a Pixar communiverse, with all three directors and two of the three writers having had a hand in previous Pixar hits, including Coco, Soul and Turning Red.) Business as usual is still frisky business for these creative super-geniuses, but you feel the strain of limber minds trying too hard.

The sugar highs of this rambunctious thrill ride are fun, in other words, but in the end Elio is most memorable when it eases up to celebrate the invisible ties of love and friendship that bind all of us aliens to each other. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go lie down for a while.

Elio is in New Zealand cinemas now.