| Worth seeing: | as another visually arresting Disney film about an orphan, befriending an alien, to bring peace to the universe, while finding himself |
| Director: | Adrian Molina, Domee Shi, Madeline Sharafian |
| Featuring: | Remy Edgerly, Yonas Kibreab, Zoë Saldaña, Ana de la Reguera, Anissa Borrego, Atsuko Okatsuka, Brad Garrett, Brandon Moon, Jake Getman, Jameela Jamil, Matthias Schweighöfer, Naomi Watanabe, Shirley Henderson, Young Dylan |
| Length: | 99 minutes |
| Certificate: | PG |
| Country: | US |
| Released: | 20th June 2025 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
After the death of his parents, young Elio (Yonas Kibreab) is struggling to find purpose in his own life. He now lives on a military base with his Aunt Olga (living with his Aunt Olga (Zoë Saldaña), who has given up dreams of becoming an astronaut to look after him.
Despite her efforts to give him a good life, Elio dreams of escaping this world and through his CB radio and messages written in the sand, he desperately tries to communicate with aliens and ask them to take him away.
One day, his dream comes true, as he’s sucked up into a UN-style assembly, known as the Communiverse, where they believe he is the official representative of Planet Earth, so they send him to try to negotiate a peace deal with a ruthless alien warlord, Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett).
Elio ends up befriending Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), who – like Elio – doesn’t feel like he belongs in his world. He doesn’t want any of the violence and warmongering of his father.
Soon, Grigon is on the war path and the leaders of the Communiverse realise that Elio is not, in fact, Earth’s representative, but a lost and lonely orphan, with nothing to offer them.
Can Elio and Glordon rise to the occasion and bring about peace between Lord Grigon and the Communiverse – while finding their own purpose in life? Of course they can – this is a Pixar film.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Coming just weeks after Lilo & Stitch, Pixar’s parent company Disney has delivered another film about an orphan befriending an alien as a first step to ensuring peaceful relations across the universe. A pattern is emerging – a sign, perhaps, that even the most imaginative story-tellers could be running out of stories – or are reaching for well-worn formulas to rest their brains.
Nevertheless, Pixar manages to tick all the right boxes, with the central character and his sidekick both searching for – and finding – themselves, in the most unexpected places – and thanks to encounters with the most unexpected intergalactic beings – showing, as much as anything else, that it’s not just us here on Earth who are struggling to come to terms with what life needs from us and what we need from it. And it’s not just here on Earth that wildly different communities are better off when they can get along.
In that sense at least, this film is trying to do something a little different, as it combines a coming-of-age tale with an introduction to global politics.
But with these collected themes, it inevitably feels a little heavy, like a melancholy exploration of bereavement, with less of the lightness of touch we have come to expect from Pixar adventures.
Completely randomly, there are also thematic similarities with the recent Mickey 17, with central characters being cloned and a very similar looking sidekick.
Pixar can always be relied upon to entertain, with fast-paced action in visually arresting, imaginary worlds – but sometimes, it feels like they are trying to do too much beyond the basic story-telling, leaving the most important part of the film to feel a little stale.