The 29th feature film from Pixar Animation Studios has been a troubled production, marked by repeated delays, limited marketing support and internal studio uncertainty.
Originally slated for 2024, the film was pushed to 2025 amid the company’s restructuring and mass lay-offs. The original idea, based on the lonely military-base childhood of Adrian Molina, one of the directors of the Pixar film Coco, was reassigned to the short-film director Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi, who made Turning Red.
These creative shifts tell in the finished product. The mother of the title character, once voiced by America Ferrera, has been replaced by Zoë Saldaña’s aunt, a major in the US air force who specialises in space debris. The family’s Latin origins are no longer part of the screenplay.
Molina’s initial idea remains: Elio (Yonas Kibreab), an 11-year-old orphan, is such an oddball that the other ham-radio kids think he’s weird. Since losing his parents he has been obsessed with getting abducted by aliens. Elio finally gets his wish when he’s mistaken for Earth’s leader, at which he’s gleefully beamed up to a Day-Glo intergalactic space station, the headquarters of the Communiverse.
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There he bonds with the equally alienated Glordon (Remy Edgerly) – picture a cuddly version of Dune’s sandworms – and vexes Glordon’s warlord dad, Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett).
Aesthetically, the film recalls Coco but without the elaborate world-building. Emotionally, it’s pitched at the slightly hollow level of Onward, with plenty of synthetic lifting from Rob Simonsen’s score and a lot of heavy leaning into the magic of the Voyager probe programme of the 1970s.
Elio is a half-formed thing. The basic story beats suggest that subplots and jokes have gone missing. Even the buddy comedy between Elio and Glordon is curiously marginalised. The candy-coloured character designs will please younger viewers, but the all-ages pleasures of peak Pixar are in short supply.
In cinemas from Friday, June 20th
