Elio, the most recent Pixar movie, hit theaters on June 20. The movie’s protagonist is Elio, a wildly imaginative kid who moves to live on a military base with his aunt, Olga, after the death of his parents. Olga and Elio’s relationship is strained at first, and then aliens abduct Elio as a group of boys is about to beat him up. The events following the abduction culminate in Elio and Olga’s reunion back on Earth. Now, at first glance, this film seems sweet—moving, even. The movie has funny moments, and the characters are endearing. So, what is the issue here? What is so ineffective about this movie? The most major problem is this: Elio doesn’t feel like it means anything.
There is nothing that truly drives the movie that lies beneath the surface to make it more impactful. The movie’s lack of deeper meaning hit me the most intensely in the emotional climax of the movie, when Elio and Olga reunite when he is forced back to Earth. Olga assures him she loves every part of him and has truly missed him. Elio and Olga’s reunion is sweet, yes, but I also found myself not understanding why I was supposed to care.
Elio’s central conflict with Olga is that he is invested in a fantasy of being abducted by aliens. He doesn’t go to school or make friends and will do anything—even anything dangerous—to prove that aliens are not just a fantasy. His obsession stems from feeling like aliens are the only things in the universe that want him, but the fact that Elio thinks he’s not wanted stems from the fact that he thinks he’s making Olga’s life more stressful by being so wrapped up in the aliens. The confusing, cyclical nature of Elio and Olga’s conflict is a paradox of sorts.
Also, Olga only communicates how valuable Elio is to her and takes him seriously after she learns that everything he is saying about aliens is true. The idea of the movie seems to be that you should love every part of someone, but only if you can believe in and make logical sense of their interests, personality and values, which is not acceptance.
Good contrasts to the shallow message of this movie are movies like A Bug’s Life or Wall-E. A Bug’s Life is a captivating story with emotional and hilarious moments, but it’s also a representation of colonialism and our capitalist society. Wall-E is a wonderful childhood movie that also represents what happens when anti-environmentalism and a lack of human connection overtake a society.
There are no such impactful themes in Elio. Sure, he could be an inspiration to children in military families who feel isolated or children with unusual interests, but those concepts are all explicitly shown in the movie. There is no theme that drives the story other than the surface-level content directly handed to us.
As it turns out, in the original version of the movie, Elio was implied to be gay or, at the very least, queer-coded. He had a poster of a suggested male crush in his room. In a deleted scene, Elio found trash on the beach and used it to make various pieces of clothing to show off to a hermit crab, including a pink tank top. According to a Pixar employee, Elio’s original director, Adrian Molina, based the movie on his childhood. He is an openly gay writer and director who grew up on an army base, both of which seem to be what inspired Elio.
Following a meeting with Pixar executives, Molina stepped down from directing Elio, and Pixar gave the movie to two new directors, Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi. Many creatives on the team stepped down soon after Sharafian and Shi presented the first cut of their version. There are reports of orders to constantly sand down moments in the movie that suggested Elio’s gay identity. In the final cut, Elio still lives on an army base. But gay? That isn’t the Elio the audience sees.
When I watched the released version of Elio, I could tell where these new and old scripts seem to weave in and out of each other—moments where it seems like Elio may be about something deeper until it is snatched out of reach.
We could argue all day about whether Molina’s version of Elio’s character is even implied to be gay, but from a plot perspective, his original identity also makes more sense for the movie. A feminine kid wrestling with his identity and relationships and being bullied for expressing his true self at the military base would make the movie mean so much more.
In the end, Elio is a kids’ movie. The movie is fun and, although it does not necessarily follow an original formula for the plot, it does use a tried and true one that could leave someone misty-eyed by the end. The problem with the movie is that Pixar labelled Elio’s queer identity, which is infused into the essence of the movie as not profitable enough, which excludes diverse voices. When you try to make a movie that is relatable to and appeases everyone, you end up with a movie that everyone can agree is mediocre.