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Pixar’s Elio Grapples With Loneliness on Earth and in the Communiverse
Movies & TV
Elio
Pixar’s Elio Grapples With Loneliness on Earth and in the Communiverse
After a slow first act, Pixar’s latest offering brings our need for connection into the stars… and right back home again.
By Ben Francisco
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Published on June 23, 2025
Credit: Disney/Pixar
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Credit: Disney/Pixar
I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation and young adult novels about kids exploring the stars. As a Latinx writer, I’ve long been immersed in Latinx speculative fiction, from magic realism to the recent boom of science fiction across the Latin American diaspora. I also love a good animated tear-jerker, and when Pixar started churning them out, I suddenly had a regular fix I didn’t even know I’d been craving. So when I heard that Elio, Pixar’s newest film, was about a Latinx kid embroiled in an outer space adventure, I knew the movie would offer a trifecta of my favorite things—and I knew I’d be in the theater on opening night.
Elio’s titular hero (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a recently orphaned 11-year-old being raised by his tía Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña), who works for the air force tracking space debris. Elio is obsessed with making first contact with extraterrestrial life, convinced that of the millions of planets out there, there must be at least one where he’ll fit in. After some struggles with bullies and a difficult argument with tía Olga, Elio’s wish comes true—he’s swept up in a bright light and whisked away to the Communiverse, an interstellar community committed to sharing knowledge across the Galaxy.
Overall, Elio is an evocative and strong addition to the Pixar opus—but the first act is slow. Some choices, like making Elio’s orphanhood the central reason for his loneliness, or his aunt considering sending him to boarding school, feel like low-hanging fruit—especially since Pixar has largely managed to avoid that kind of well-trodden territory over the course of 29 films. The long set-up also entirely takes place in a mundane, contemporary setting, with none of the imaginative visuals that make an animated movie uniquely pleasurable for both children and adults.
Even so, the opening scenes have glimmers of the film’s overall brilliance, especially in the depiction of Elio’s compelling character. There’s undeniable fun and humor in a kid who is trying so desperately to get intentionally abducted by aliens. My personal favorite detail is “Elio-ese,” Elio’s invented language spoken only by him—and previously by his parents, until they died. What better way to capture a child’s loneliness than holding an entire language that no one else shares?
As the film moves into its second act, the same lights that snatched up Elio enrapture the audience’s attention as well. Elio sees the wonders of advanced technology—a liquid supercomputer, a machine that can answer any question—and meets the diverse and visually compelling ambassadors of the Communiverse. Here, the filmmakers use the power of the animated medium to great effect, creating extraterrestrials that go beyond the standard anthropomorphic aliens with ridges—but who still have just enough human features to convey intelligible emotional expressions. I especially liked the character design of Tegman, a sandstone-like alien whose head is positioned in the middle of his body rather than on top of it.
The Communiverse ambassadors mistake Elio for the leader of Earth—an error that he does not correct. When the battle-happy Hylurg threaten to attack the Communiverse, Elio volunteers to negotiate for peace, hoping to prove himself and take the fast track to a space ambassadorship and the chance to keep hanging out with cool aliens indefinitely. Alas, Elio’s negotiation attempts do not go well, and he soon finds himself a prisoner—but also befriends Glordon, the unexpectedly soft-hearted son of the Hylurg warlord.
Personally, I find there’s a special Pixar sweet spot at the intersection of stunning visuals, creative world-building, and emotional resonance. Elio really starts humming with the introduction of Glordon and the Hylurg—where it hits all three of those elements squarely on the head. We quickly learn that while the Hylurg present as towering armored warriors, in their true form they’re smaller, gooeyer, and much less intimidating caterpillar-like creatures. They weave webs that are sometimes used to wrap anxious children like Glordon in a comforting swaddle. Glordon lacks eyes and a nose, but the deft animation and Remy Edgerly’s equally deft voice acting never lack for clarity of emotional expression. And in Glordon, Elio finally finds the companionship he so desperately missed on Earth.
For me as a GenXer, Elio at times strikes a lovely note of nostalgia for a string of 1980s movies about kids connecting with aliens. Elio and Glordon’s connection harkened to Explorers, about three kids who make first contact, only to find that their newfound alien friends are also just a couple kids out for a joyride in their parents’ spaceship. A clone duplicate temporarily subs for Elio at home with his tía Olga, giving shades of The Last Starfighter, in which a robot duplicate fills in for life on Earth while the human protagonist is off star-fighting. Elio is part of a larger lineage of film and literature in which it is children and teenagers who make contact with sentient alien life, from the iconic E.T. and old Heinlein adventure novels to Jupiter Ascending and more recent young adult novels like Charlie Jane Anders’ Unstoppable series.
Adult readers and viewers sometimes struggle to suspend disbelief for the premise of these stories—surely, an eleven-year-old would not be properly equipped to make first contact!—yet younger audience members rarely raise such unnecessary questions. My favorite explanation for this phenomenon is found in Ambassador, William Alexander’s excellent middle-grade novel, which also tells the story of a young Latinx space ambassador and shares much of its DNA with Elio. In the universe of Ambassador, it’s only the juveniles of a species who may serve as ambassadors for their world: they have not yet “drawn a circle around those worth talking to” and so are more capable of adapting to the challenges of interplanetary communication. While young people exploring the galaxy may prompt some logistical questions, it also carries an undeniable emotional resonance: our sense of wonder at the unknown is never quite the same as when we’re eleven, the true “golden age” of science fiction.
Elio pays homage to many of these other tales, while also rendering an original Pixar take. As the film climaxes, the story brilliantly entwines Elio’s search for connection with humanity’s search for life beyond our planet. All of the seeds planted in the first two acts pay off, with an interstellar confrontation that hinges on family and friendships—human, alien, and across species. Elio has a number of delightful Easter eggs for fans of science and science fiction, including voice cameos by Kate Mulgrew and Carl Sagan, making use of an archival recording in which Sagan reflects on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. We have always wondered about life in the stars, Sagan reflects, but our modern era is unique in that we now have the power to do something about it – to send out space crafts, search for signals, and scan the stars. Elio offers a reminder that loneliness is part of the human condition, but so is reaching out—to the sky above, and to one another here on Earth.[end-mark]
The post Pixar’s <i>Elio</i> Grapples With Loneliness on Earth and in the Communiverse appeared first on Reactor.
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