- Starring
- Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Brad Garrett
- Directors
- Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi
- Rating
- Not Yet Rated
- Genre
- Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
- Release date
- June 13, 2025
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
In Disney and Pixar’s Elio, an 11-year-old boy named Elio Solis, a space enthusiast with a vivid imagination, is accidentally beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary organization of alien representatives. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s ambassador, Elio must navigate a galactic crisis, form bonds with eccentric alien lifeforms, including his new friend Glordon, and discover his true place in the universe.
Elio Review
It’s been a long time since Disney’s won hearts and minds with its… well, anything. Year after year, they lose millions on their films, alienate massive swaths of lifelong fans of classic franchises, and generally screw up everything they touch. Other than that, everything’s going fine. Elio might not be a radical shift that rights the ship, but it ain’t half bad, either.
Pixar’s 29th feature-length film is a briskly paced 1 hour and 39 minutes, with sufficient heart to keep parents more or less engaged and enough cartoon action to satisfy the kiddos. Truth be told, Elio had enough story just sitting there between the lines to warrant another twenty minutes, and its truncated runtime is its greatest weakness.
Elio limits itself to only two subplots, each of which, defying what’s become modern convention, actually bolsters and enriches the main story arc. However, all three of these stories (including the primary one) are needlessly rushed, giving us relationships that feel, perhaps not hollow, but more tenuous than what’s needed to truly move and capture audiences like The Incredibles and other early Pixar films. Furthermore, the resolutions to various problems are equally hasty and subsequently fail to raise one’s heart rate as much as the filmmakers might hope.
That doesn’t mean that you won’t connect at all. Several of the main themes are so ingrained within our DNA that, for many, it won’t take much to bridge the empathic gap—the need to feel loved and wanted by parents, the importance of a loving father, and the salience of platonic male friendships.
The voice acting is mostly top-notch, though Zoe Saldaña must stop getting cast just because she’s latina. She’s a decent enough actress who delivers an adequate vocal performance in this, just as she has in the Avatar films. However, when compared to Brad Garrett’s (Lord Grigon) villainous sonority or even relative newcomer Yonas Kibreab’s (Elio) vulnerable sincerity, Saldaña comes up a tad short. True, she’s helped little by a script that doesn’t entirely know what to do with her, nor by a role that was almost certainly intended initially for a man.
As has been the case many times before, the technical excellence of Pixar’s animators and artists is this film’s greatest achievement. Elio is an exquisitely animated film that, despite being generated in a soulless machine, feels emotionally real and tactile. The beautifully soothing color palette is a joy, and the detail in every inch of every frame is surely beyond the dreams of the studio’s early animators. Regrettably, despite this artistry, the hurried story needlessly restricts the scope and impact of the visuals. The advanced technology isn’t really explored, the vastness of space is an afterthought, and the locales are surprisingly limited.
When the quantum torpedoes are exhausted and the phaser banks are powered down, this Disney space adventure falls short of its epic potential, giving us instead a safe and serviceable film that doesn’t quite meet our standards of what’s Worth it. Still, it’s good enough that I’ll take my family to see it, and better than anything else original that Disney has put out in a shamefully long time.
PARENTAL NOTES
A+
- Blessedly, I have very little to say for this section. There’s no cursing, no sexualization, and no use of the Lord’s name in vain. Both the limited violence and the more intense scenes are very PG.
WOKE REPORT
Arrrghh
- Many, including myself, assumed that the patch Elio wears prominently in the ads was going to be a woke and pandering nod to inclusivity. It is not. Its a poorly conceived plot device, and nothing more. Elio gets pokes in the eye and wears it for a short time. Dumb, but not woke.
What’s Not Woke
- The following gave the Woke-O-Meter score a significant boost toward BASED.
- One of the key (and more poignant) subplots revolves around the importance of a strong, loving, and supportive father in a young boy’s life.
- Even though it seems hesitant to do so, only delving into it on a superficial level, by the film’s end, Elio’s auntAgain, the film seems only willing to infer it rather than say it clearly.Spoilerseems to realize that being a mother to her recently orphaned nephew is more important and fulfilling than her vocational ambitions.
- Platonic male relationships are shown as vital and not denigrated in any way.
DIEsney
- There are a handful of very brief scenes (perhaps three that total maybe five minutes of screen time) that depict personnel at a military installation, and I can recall seeing possibly one or two white women (and that’s questionable), and have no memory of seeing a single white male in uniform.
- The female soldiers slightly outnumbered the male ones.
- Elio and his aunt are latino, which is fine. After all, we keep telling these studios to make original content instead of recasting white characters. The issue is that over the last 8 years, Pixar has released ten feature-length films. Four of them starred minority characters, two were led by white gals, and three were non-human. Only the crappy Lightyear, that is remembered solely because of its lesbian supporting characters, starred a white male human. I suppose that you could also count Woody from Toy Story 4, even though he’s technically not human.
- This fact doesn’t make Elio a woke film unto itself, and I didn’t ding the Woke-O-Meter for it, but when you consider that the Left’s narrative is a push for fair and accurate representation, it’s certainly of note. That said, Elio doesn’t go too far out of its way to make a point of the characters’ ethnicity.
- He calls her tia instead of aunt once, and they briefly listen to a latin song on the radio in a single scene.
- This fact doesn’t make Elio a woke film unto itself, and I didn’t ding the Woke-O-Meter for it, but when you consider that the Left’s narrative is a push for fair and accurate representation, it’s certainly of note. That said, Elio doesn’t go too far out of its way to make a point of the characters’ ethnicity.
Whitey
- In the entire film, I can recall only two white male characters (the ambiguity of some of the animation makes it difficult to say with certainty if any of the women were white). The first is a blonde-haired bully, and the other is a socially awkward, middle-aged, overweight nerd who lives alone. Neither are given much screen time, and the nerd gets a narratively important moment to shine heroically.
It’s A Man’s World
- I think it’s pretty likely that the aunt was initially written as a male character, if for no other reason than the organic parity that would have played between this new father and the seasoned one (Lord Grigon), both learning what fatherhood means and what it takes to be a good one.
- Because I have no proof other than my gut, and because her womanhood wasn’t made a part of the narrative, I chose not to mark the Woke-O-Meter down for it.
James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
11 comments
The Critic
June 24, 2025 at 2:21 pm
Thanks for reviewing this! I was wondering about this movie after my kid got the McDonalds toy for it.
Jerry
June 25, 2025 at 5:59 pm
What kind of website is this tf
tbird2249
June 27, 2025 at 2:02 pm
What about LGBTQ?
James Carrick
June 27, 2025 at 2:07 pm
What about it? Did we miss something?
Sweet Deals
July 1, 2025 at 1:11 am
I recently read that Pixar originally intended Elio to be a sissy boy, but that proved unpopular with test audiences so they scrubbed that out of his character early on. Turns out that woke isn’t as cool in the mainstream as many of their animators think it is in their southern California bubble.
I’m going to refrain from judgment until the movie goes to streaming. Until then, I might dust off my old copy of Can of Worms (2000) and watch that again instead.
KirbyRancher99
July 1, 2025 at 1:42 pm
I think what Pixar did was the right thing, because I think it would made this movie more woke. So I am glad they took that out, plus I had been looking forward to this movie for a long time. I’m waiting for it to come out on home media, as I don’t have a theater in my area sadly.
Leela
July 4, 2025 at 11:52 am
Obrigada, mas o fato de partes mais aprofundadas estarem behind a pay wall was a turn off for me.
James Carrick
July 4, 2025 at 2:06 pm
The Woke Elements of our free reviews are viewable with our Free membership.
TG
July 11, 2025 at 7:32 pm
I just want to sincerely thank you for doing this. As of the last few years, before we take our son to a movie, I find myself scouring the internet to make sure there’s nothing in it that goes against our values. Sad that I even have to, but this Is exactly what I needed. A fantastic website! You’re doing the Lord’s work! Thank you, again.
ArenaTuvian
July 11, 2025 at 8:06 pm
We, too, make sure we fully vet a movie before taking the kidlets to see it. Sadly, despite the fact that they scrubbed all the LGBTQ elements out of it, what was left is the barest scraps of a film, and we’re going to skip it anyway. From what I’ve read, they didn’t rewrite the movie, they just erased all the queer positive elements from it, leaving behind a movie that doesn’t really resonate with anyone.
Hopefully, after all the woke movies that were already in production pre-2025 have been released, film companies will finally start releasing better films that aren’t just about checking boxes in lieu of having an actual story.
Sweet Deals
November 1, 2025 at 10:41 am
Now that I did watch the movie, I have a clear opinion on it. Despite the near-constant action leaving little air and space to breathe, Elio is a movie about nothing featuring characters who don’t really do anything.
Compare Lilo from the Disney classic Lilo and Stitch. Lilo is a young Hawaiian girl who goes free-diving to give sandwiches to her favorite fish. She hula dances. She takes photographs of weird tourists. She sews her own dolls and listens to Elvis records. She’s a cool and interesting kid who does a lot of different things. She struggles to make friends with other girls in her hula class, but it’s clear that she puts in the effort. What does Elio do? Besides wearing ugly capes decorated with garbage, nothing. He lies in the sand on the beach all day waiting for aliens to pick him up and mopes about the house eating cold pizza at night because his aunt has to work. If he was an obsessive collector of Buzz Lightyear toys and had a bad habit of yelling a lot and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, he’d be annoying but at least then he’d be more amusing to watch. He doesn’t even put in any effort to contacting aliens or making friends: he puts out an ad for someone to join his club as a false pretense to steal his HAM radio (and later hijack the army’s radio) rather than trying to build his own or trying to find a genuinely like-minded friend. He complains to his aunt suggesting that she never wanted him, but in my observations the opposite is true: Elio’s aunt works very hard to try to relate to her nephew and he’s the one who keeps pushing her away. If you’re not an alien, then Elio doesn’t want anything to do with you. He comes across as a self-centered space case.
Moving on, the Communiverse is a world of disorienting alien geometry with no air, heat or sense of gravity, because every alien there has to wear a forcefield bubble for life-support. The Galactic Federation in Lilo and Stitch had some serious teeth: they held a trial to put the dangerous mad scientist Jumba Jookiba in maximum security prison, they used maximum security quarantine protocols to transport Stitch (which he was clever and strong enough to evade), and they were totally willing to destroy Earth in order to ensure Stitch wouldn’t survive had Pleakley and Cobra Bubbles not obstructed them. By contrast, most of the aliens in the Communiverse are spineless, gutless, floating blob things who look gentle and happy, but don’t really do that much besides recite bad poetry, drink purple glop and flush themselves down the toilet rather than involve themselves in serious galactic affairs. As soon as Lord Grogar appears and postures up to them, their response is to cower and hide from him despite the fact that he hasn’t really done anything other than look tough. And although one of the aliens in the Communiverse has the power to read minds, they all fall for Elio’s lies about being an experienced space ambassador without even bothering to take the time to vet him and confirm that what he’s telling them is true. I hereby decree that the Communiverse is lame.
Even Lord Grogar, storied and frightening as he appears, is also a villain who doesn’t do anything. I think the reason why he wears such an imposing, heavily-armed carapace and never takes it off is because he’s too ashamed to admit that underneath, he’s just as soft and spineless as the rest of the Communiverse aliens. He has weapons but doesn’t really point them at anything other than skeet targets, and his threats to destroy the Communiverse sound empty and childish. His son Glordon says he doesn’t want to put on a carapace and never take it off because it would prevent him from doing the fun things he enjoys, but we never see him doing any of that stuff; he just sits in his room swaddling himself in webbing. Combine all this with a plot where Elio’s greatest successes mostly happen by accident, through the use of technology that he didn’t create that automatically does everything for him, or relying on other characters’ abilities to do the heavy lifting for him instead of solving the problem himself, and the result is a boring, selfish character whom I have no reason to root for in a plot where most of the tension feels completely fake.
If you’d like to see a better version of a movie about a boy who makes contact with bad aliens, I’d like to recommend The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius. While this Nickelodeon film is not as emotional or visually polished as a Pixar flick, Jimmy Neutron is a genius inventor who is always trying to stretch the boundaries of his knowledge. He builds his own rockets and his own communication devices, much to the chagrin of his (very understanding) parents who don’t want him doing things that may endanger him. Jimmy Neutron is wise enough to know what’s right but young and foolish enough not to choose it. It’s a very silly movie whose characters are very aware of their own silliness and embrace it without being sarcastic or hostile. It straddles a careful balance between “Your parents love you and they place limits for a reason” and “Children need to be free to make their own mistakes”. It’s a lot more fun and creative than this piece of extruded green slime posing as a pandering movie.