Elio (2025)

PG.  It's really funny.  My second youngest daughter did not want to do this for family movie night because there's a really scary scene in it, according to her.  She told me when it was coming up and she hid her eyes in my shoulder and I let her know when the scene was over.  Spoiler alert: the scene was not scary.  There were some scenes that were a little scary.  There's one joke that's entire punchline is how scary this is for a kids' movie.  But, honestly, Elio is fantastically tame.  Some younger kids might have a problem with the fact that Elio is orphaned and has to deal with dead parents.  But beyond that, it's pretty mild.

DIRECTORS: Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, and Domee Shi

I hate that I kind of like this movie.

I mean, the movie is the safest Disney movie I've seen in a while and that's a real problem considering that I know the background of this movie.  I wish I didn't.  For those not in the know, Adrian Molina, who is credited first for directing this movie, made this as a personal story about feeling alienated when it came to being a young homosexual.  I get the vibes that Disney and Pixar have a tumultuous relationship.  Pixar --and thank goodness for this --loves pushing the emotional and cultural envelope when it comes to a lot of their movies.  Disney isn't completely devoid of being challenging.  It's just that they see the bottom dollar first and foremost and that often means nerfing artists' visions when it comes to saying meaningful things. There have to have been arguments in boardrooms and some name-calling has to have happened. 

I wish that I didn't know that story because I feel like I could have lived with the vanillaness of Elio without the background that someone's very personal tale wasn't forcably removed in exchange for something that would play better in the Fly Over states.  Because the worst part of it all is that Elio didn't make that much of an impact culurally.  I mean, here I am, writing about Elio because it is up for Best Animated Feature.  It's not going to win.  Oh, heck no.  KPop Demon Hunters is going to run away with that one easily.  It's just depressing to think that, if Disney decided to take a chance with this one, it might have been a movie that we talked about for years.  But alternatively, it could have been one of those movies that still tanked, regardless of how it was made and then people would be blaming the homosexual agenda and all around wokeness for why the movie didn't do well.  Again, I can speculate all day.

But as a vanilla movie about a kid, the one thing that kind of gets me about Pixar, even when they aren't pushing the boundary about theme, is that they get human interaction.  Elio thrives because it understands that relationships are messy and that people are idiosycratic.  Listen, I don't want to slag KPop Demon Hunters because I think that movie is absolutely fabulous. But as much as I like KPop Demon Hunters, it isn't great with vulnerablilty.  The characters get sad and fight, sure.  But Elio's problems, from moment one in this picture, come from the burden of having to exist in a world where there's nothing left for you.  For the sake of a coherent blog post, I am going to pretend that I didn't know about the heartwrenching gay narrative and stick with the dead family thing.  I apologize to the LGBTQIA+ community, but I am better with the dead parent narrative.  You're right.  It should have been your issue.  But since I can talk about what was on screen, I'm going to do that.

If the story, regardless of intent, is about alienation, it doesn't matter what the external conflict of the story is.  Honestly, the external conflict is all window dressing.  Elio is a borderline animated reskin of Galaxy Quest in a lot of ways.  It may not be straight up making commentary on Star Trek, but the rest is there.  The protagonist, through heavy heapings of dramatic irony, is lying to these aliens, pretending that he's some big tough hero so he can stay in space.  A violent alien threatens to expose his ineptitude.  He's eventually revealed to be a fraud, but still stands up for the right thing in the end.  It's all very fun and the kids in the family got behind that.  But what this story is all about is in the small moments.  It's kind of amazing that I'm not attacking this movie harder, considering that the movie almost buries its purpose for existing.

If the story is about alienation (see, I got back there!), then the entire adventure story in space is almost a way for Elio to distract himself from the real problems he has.  Yes, he's a child so we have to cut him some slack. But every time we get a little invested in the external conflict of the film, there's a small reminder that Elio has way bigger problems.  I do kind of like that we don't have to have the Bambi moment of seeing Elio's parents die or the fact that he's handed off to Aunt Olga.  Instead, we have an almost in media res situation where Elio is already resentful of his aunt and she is in over her head.  He's desperate for any kind of escape and it is the voice of Kate Mulgrew, appropriately talking about Voyager (the probe, not the ship.  Both were vital to Star Trek lore though, so just enjoy all of the levels of nerddom happening there.).  When he uses a love for space in an unhealthy way, it's scary how quick he wants to abandon any family ties.  There's the narrative not necessarily in the background, but not in the foreground, of how hurt Aunt Olga is about how Elio treats her.  

All of this leads to my favorite moment in the film.  One of the more fun ideas behind Elio is that there is a duplicate who is borderline a robot that clones your genetic material so no one notices that you are missing.  It's a fun device conceptually, but it also leads to commentary on the role of parents, adopted or no.  The Clone Elio at home eventually gets discovered that he's not real, which is a level of intuition that made me feel guilty.  I personally would look at my kids' improved behavior as good fortune and never question it.  Thank goodness that the aliens sent a message to Aunt Olga to make her just paranoid enough to question weirdness in her life.  Anyway, Elio looks in on how the clone is doing and, when he sees that both the clone and Aunt Olga are happy, he realizes how easy it would have been to make this woman happy.  Yes, real Elio shrugs off this moment because he's in the midst of a crisis.  But the fact that he sees that even the smallest of effort would have changed his guardian's life is interesting.

This leads me back to the fact that the film is vanilla.  Because beyond Aunt Olga's frustrations with the fact that she has no idea what she's doing as a parent, the only other fun commentary is the role of non-traditional friendships.  I love Glordon.  I really do.  He's a great supporting castmate.  But there isn't much there to say beyond the fact that Glordon doesn't get along with this dad?  I mean, sure, I could dive deep into the fact that, for all of Grigon's faults, he's a good dad, kind of?  It's so surface level that I almost don't feel like writing about it.  But this is typical Disney fodder.  It's not as challenging as most Pixar films and that's why Elio is ultimately going to be forgotten in the long run.  

It's a fun movie.  I had a good time with it.  But you can feel that there were no chances being taken with this one.  I'm sure that the corporate higher ups are all nervous in the fact that people don't go to the movies anymore and can't respect creators enough to challenge audiences, regardless of if they're going to show up anymore.  Still, it's a fun movie that no one will remember this time next year.  It's a good time without a lot of substance.