“Elio”, the latest animation feature film from Pixar Animation Studios, is a modest but sweet SF fantasy tale which often amused me for good reasons. While it will be fairly enjoyable to young audiences thanks to its bright and colorful visual elements, the film will touch you especially if you were ever eager to learn more about whatever is beyond our home planet, and you may also appreciate how much it is influenced by a number of notable American SF films in the 1980s.

 The early part of the film focuses on the aching loneliness of its little hero. After suddenly losing his dear parents due to some unspecified incident, Elio Solis (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) has felt quite alone and unwanted, and even his aunt Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña), an army officer working in a big military facility monitoring those dangerous space debris outside the Earth, does not provide him much comfort, even though she really tries her best for raising her nephew alone by herself. 

Anyway, Elio has been quite interested in the universe and the possible existence of aliens thanks to his chance encounter with an exhibition associated with Carl Sagan and Voyager I, and he has aspired to be taken to anywhere but the Earth just because he has not often felt like being at home on the Earth. As soon as summer starts, he goes to a nearby beach, and then he tries to receive any message from the space beyond the Earth via his amateur radio, while a certain famous song from Talking Heads is humorously played on the soundtrack.

And then there comes an unlikely opportunity for Elio. When he later happens to be with his aunt at that military facility, he comes upon a chance to respond to what may be a reply from whoever met Voyager I somewhere in the universe, and he instantly grabs that chance without any hesitation. This eventually causes a big trouble for both him and his aunt, but, what do you know, it turns out that his response was actually received by a group of alien creatures out there, who subsequently transport him to their headquarters in a way reminiscent of the climax of Robert Zemeckis’ “Contact” (1997).  

These aliens are the members of an interplanetary organization called “Communiverse”, and, not knowing that he is actually a young kid, they mistake Elio for the leader of the Earth. Just because he can live there once he gets accepted into Communiverse, Elio lies to the aliens, but, of course, his deception soon gets threatened due to an aggressive alien warlord who is not so pleased about not getting accepted by Communiverse. In exchange for getting accepted into Communiverse, Elio agrees to deal with that alien warlord for himself, and his task seems rather easy up to a certain point.

Around that point, Elio come to befriend a little alien who is also a kid just like him, and that makes the film look like a cross between Nick Castle’s “The Last Starfighter” (1984) and Joe Dante’s “Explorers” (1985). As a matter of fact, the movie borrows a certain story idea from the former (Hint: It involves with cloning), and you may be more amused by how the film also adds a bit of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) and “Starman” (1984) to this borrowed story idea later.

Needless to say, Elio and Glordon (voiced by Remy Edgerly), who incidentally looks like a cuter version of those aliens in Bong Joon-ho’s “Mickey 17” (2025), become each other’s best friend along the story. At one point in the middle of the story, they have to crawl inside a labyrinthic network of narrow tunnels, and you may be a bit tickled by how Glordon can actually talk in more than one way, which somehow reminds me of that bizarre talking bug in David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” (1991).

The film feels a bit too hurried as shifting to action mode during the last act, and I think the screenplay by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, and Mike Jones could provide more depth and personality to its story and characters before eventually arriving at the expected ending, Nevertheless, the film has enough humor and sensitivity to engage us, and, as a guy who once memorized all the planets in the solar system and many of their numerous satellites during his childhood years, I could not help but feel a little sentimental as watching Voyager I and then listening to a piece of audio recording from Carl Sagan (I still had an old translated copy of that famous book written by him, by the way). 

The voice cast members of the film are mostly solid on the whole. Young performer Yonas Kibreab did a fine job of imbuing his character with vibrant spirit and likability, and he and his fellow young performer Remy Edgerly are convincing in the relationship development between their characters. In case of several notable adult voice cast members including Zoe Saldaña, Brad Garrett, Jameela Jamil, Shirley Henderson, and Matthias Schweighöfer, they simply fill their respective supporting roles, and that is another weak aspect of the film.

In conclusion, “Elio”, directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina, is one or two steps down from the recent better offering from Pixar Animation Studios such as “Coco” (2017) or “Turning Red” (2022), but it is still entertaining enough to compensate for its flawed aspects. Sure, Pixar Animation Studios can do much better than this, but, folks, after not so impressed by the live action adaptations of “Lilo & Stitch” (2002) and “How to Train Your Dragon” (2010), I felt an urgent need for any good new animation film out there, and I am glad that “Elio” satisfies me a bit more than expected.