Film Review - Elio (2025)

Elio is the new Pixar Animation film and concerns a young boy named Elio (Yonas Ascunsion Kibreab) who has been orphaned and lives with his Air Force Colonel Aunt (Zoe Saldana) and dreams of being abducted by Aliens and one night his wish comes true but as they say in the classics, be careful what you wish for.

Elio is not a bad movie at all and it is certainly miles ahead of some of the movies I’ve seen it be compared to such as Wish, Strange World and Lightyear but it is also far from the best movie Pixar Animation has given us over the years, the film does have some good animation going for it especially with the various alien species Elio meets throughout the film though one creature will remind you of the creatures in Mickey 17 from earlier this year and there are some heartfelt moments in the film especially towards the end.

But where this movie does fall over is in its storytelling, on the one hand it’s a movie about a boy who is mourning the loss of his parents and trying to adjust to the changes in his life and then it turns into a wacky adventure with aliens and weird creatures and an evil warlord (Brad Garrett) who wants to take over the universe and a cuddly creature friend for Elio to bond with and at times the tonal streams of these 2 storylines clash and it hurts the movie as a whole.

And again this isn’t to say this is a bad movie but those tonal shifts at times are ones I struggled with from time to time and while it does give you some good emotional moments I do wish that these 2 story strands were better integrated.

And Pixar in the past has done this very very well be it the first 3 Toy Story movies or Monsters Inc or Finding Nemo to name as a few examples but sometimes Pixar becomes so focused on making you cry that they forget that the tears have to be earnt rather than manipulated which too often has been the case with a lot of the recent Pixar movies and it’s a little sad.

And so that was Elio and its fine, perfectly okay but it is far from Pixar’s best and their best years are now feeling like a longer and longer time ago as the years go by, hopefully they can get it back one day but we’ll see, 2 out of 5.