Pixar’s Elio vs Pixar’s everything else
[MOVIE REVIEW]
To compare or not to compare, that is the question
An honest review of Pixar’s Elio and how it stacks up against classics like Coco.
It’s tempting (almost compulsory) to weigh each new Disney/Pixar release against its predecessors, as if the studio’s canon were a single, self-referential fable that grows deeper with each tale. Elio, the latest to emerge from Pixar’s cosmic nursery, has already been touted as the studio’s most affecting work since Coco. The comparison flatters both films while doing justice to neither.
Where Coco dazzled with a kaleidoscopic vision of ancestral tradition, its color-soaked afterlife as much a character as its hero, Elio gazes outward, into the star-pocked abyss of space and the universal ache of human curiosity.
It is smart, gently funny, and suffused with an innocence that feels both sincere and, at times, too gently handled.
The story pivots on a moment anyone who has ever stared up at the night sky will recognize: the sudden, insistent question, “Are we alone?” In this, Elio is achingly beautiful.
It captures childhood’s private, existential grandeur and gives it shape.
Yet, even Pixar’s magic sometimes flickers. There are three moments when Elio seems to slip its Pixar skin and don a more generic Disney cape.
First, the leap from the Earthly to the cosmic feels hurried. Absolutely charming, but rushed, as though the studio feared its audience might drift without a quick joke to tether them back.
Second, the design of outer space, while undeniably pretty, never fully seduces the eye in the way Pixar worlds often do; it feels cluttered rather than transportive, busy rather than immersive.
And then there’s the dialogue. This may be a critic’s quibble, but certain lines clang with the flatness of the over-familiar. Take, for instance, the moment in the trailer (spoiler-free) when we hear the plaintive “All I want is you.”
It is earnest, of course. It is also syrupy enough to pull the viewer out of a world otherwise tuned to wonder rather than sentimentality.
Perhaps this is the tax Pixar pays for walking that tightrope between childlike marvel and adult sophistication: once in a while, it tips too far toward the obvious.
Still, to compare Elio to Coco is to miss the deeper point. Elio is no Coco, and it needn’t be. It reminds us, sweetly and with a stargazer’s heart, that even in a universe so vast it might swallow us whole, what truly binds us to each other is not the scale of our worlds, but the scale of our questions.
Having said that, the film succeeds in its truest intention: to transport us back to a place of fantasy and pure story.
It seeps into the inner child many of us forget we carry, gently pressing us to hold back tears, to laugh, and, if we’re lucky, to look up at the night sky and wonder, just as we once did.
For that alone, Elio is worth watching on the big screen, in the dark, with eyes wide open.
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