Directors – Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi – 2025 – US – Cert. PG – 99m
****
An alien-obsessed orphan, whose aunt tracks space debris for NASA, makes contact with aliens – latest Disney / Pixar romp is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 20th
Young lad Elio Solis (voice: Yonas Kibreab) has never got over the death of his parents, and lives with his aunt Olga (voice: Zoe Soldana) with whom he doesn’t really get on, even though she puts him before the advancement of her career at NASA, where she has forgone aspiring to astronaut training and works tracking space debris. One day, she is having a meal in the large work canteen with him when he vanishes, sneaking in to an exhibit about the cosmos to hear a Carl Sagan monologue about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.
Following this incident, Elio decides that all his problems would be solved if only aliens would abduct him, and goes out of his way to make this happen, drawing a big “Abduct me” message / diagram on the beach and lying in the middle of it so he can be clearly seen from the sky, not to mention sending ham radio messages to the stars with his woefully inadequate radio transmitter.
His misjudged attempt to get better ham radio kit by inviting new members to join a non-existent hobby club ends up alienating genuinely interested nerd Bryce (voice: Dylan Gilmer) and his bully friend Caleb (voice: Jake Getman), which doesn’t bode well when all three are packed off to the same Summer camp and the pair, wearing alien masks, lead a night raid on his tent.
At this point, Elio is abducted into a vast spaceship by aliens and after being fitted with a language translation device by an anthropomorphised liquid supercomputer (voice: Shirley Henderson), finds himself in the company of peacefully minded, intergalactic ambassadors of numerous alien races (visually distinct so easy enough to tell apart, but you might struggle to remember their names, making the task of assigning actor voices to specific characters in a review such as this a difficult one – collectively, the ambassadors’ voice cast comprises Brandon Moon, Jameela Jamil, Matthias Schweighöfer, Ana de la Reguera, Atsuko Okatsuka, Naomi Watanabe and Anissa Borrego).
The boy’s abduction is less a gratuitous plot device than you might imagine, since Olga’s colleague, computer technician Gunther Melmac (voice: Brendan Hunt) was earlier dismissed by her colleagues as a crank when he picked up an incoming message from aliens who have seen the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record designed to tell any alien life-forms about humankind and its culture (here curiously rewritten from the real life disc as messages from Earth’s children). Melmac will later return as a key figure towards the end.
Learning that the ambassadors currently face the problem of dealing with expansionist, warmonger alien Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) and his hordes, Elio agrees to negotiate with the aggressor. The checklist written on the back of his band has been edited down to one last option – a bargaining chip – when he bonds with Grigon’s human-sized larva son Glordon (voice: Remy Edgerly) who doesn’t want to follow the family tradition of entering a mecha-like carapace to conquer and subdue new territory.
Elio has already sent a clone of himself back to Earth, where his aunt is getting on better with it than she ever did with him, so he also has Glordon cloned so that the clone can enter the carapace and keep his father happy while Elio and Glordon hang out on the ambassador’s ship enjoying all the entertainments and diversions it has to offer. Alas, the clones are made of different stuff from human flesh and blood and alien larva, causing Elio’s two plans to unravel…
Pixar’s latest film for the most part refuses to model itself on any of that company’s previous outings, and while placing itself squarely in the long science fiction tradition of stories about first contact with aliens, it’s very different from The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968); Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997) or even the more child-friendly E.T. – the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982).
Unlike all those films, however, it doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with its third act, – once everything starts to unravel, the piece seems to run out of steam even though it successfully resolves everything the script has set up earlier.
The one thing pilfered from previous Pixar outings is Lord Grigon, who in both basic concept and visual execution looks a lot like the evil Emperor Zurg, Buzz Lightyear’s nemesis from the Toy Story franchise. Given the current US presidency, the character has a contemporary resonance, although since animated films often take four years to shoot, this may be at least in part coincidental.
Nevertheless, there is much to admire here. The human characters are well-conceived, fleshed out and performed, reminding one of characters created by Stephen King (for instance, in the films Stand By Me, Rob Reiner, 1986, or the upcoming The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan, 2024). You completely believe the dysfunctional dynamics of the orphan living with his aunt or the self-obsessed kid falling prey to bullies.
Then there are the clones, a clever conceit since they are not actually clones, but facsimiles constructed from green gloop. This, in the end, us what does for them. It also allows for an extraordinary sequence in which Elio’s aunt discovers her nephew is in fact a clone by following a lone hair follicle as it journeys across the floor into the boy’s bedroom.
The liquid supercomputer, an element that might so easily appear clumsy in a live action SF, is an outstanding creation thanks to the fluidity of movement afforded by animation. This is also true of the assorted, extraterrestrial ambassadors, who provide for compelling viewing, albeit on the superficial level of eye candy.
Where the piece really scores, though, is as a simple morality tale for children. Elio avoids his problems on earth by escaping into personal fantasies about aliens. When he is abducted by real life aliens – can one talk about real life aliens when watching a cartoon children’s film? – he pretends or at least goes along with the idea that’d he’s the world leader of Earth when he’s no such thing. Despite such duplicity, he ultimately proves himself and saves the day, but still has to admit that his lying was wrong.
I never thought I would be writing about an animated first contact movie made by Disney. But that’s exactly what this is.
Elio is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, June 20th.
Trailer: