The Toddler Dad Movie Revue: 'Elio'
Opening weekend audiences stayed away, but it's still an original Pixar movie, right?
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Pixar’s Elio “opened soft,” over the weekend, which is either proof that studios are having a hard time with original movies for kids (“Pixar’s IP problem,” as Puck News put it), or merely a temporary setback for a movie that will eventually become a hit like Pixar’s last non-sequel title (Elemental). Thankfully, as a non-studio-exec type-person I don’t care about that stuff and I don’t have to.
For us simple movie-enjoyers, the stakes are far simpler: is Elio any good? Will my kid like it? And if so, will it be at the expense of me grinding my teeth while I suffer through it (as Elemental did)?
In order to answer these questions (and just generally escape the heat and score some dad points and get them off YouTube Shorts for a while), I took a few kids to see it. Kids I know, I mean, I’m not some kind of weirdo: my toddler, plus my middle school-aged stepson and nephew.
The short answer: Elio is much better than Elemental, if not quite as good as Turning Red (the last movie from Elio co-director Domee Shi)1. It feels decidedly like “lesser Pixar” but more in a positive, lower-stakes kind of way than a lazy or half-assed one.
Toddler Rating: 8/10
The biggest worry in taking a toddler to a movie theater is whether they’ll be able to sit through the whole thing without becoming an annoyance to those around them. On that note I’m proud to report that in his second theatrical experience (“are we going to the teeter?” he asked, cutely), my son again made it through most of the film easily and seemed engaged the whole time (minus a few minutes towards the end when he briefly seemed more interested in operating the electronic seat and trying to wrestle his cousin).
Last time we went, he ate a whole box of Sour Patch kids and drank an entire Icee and the second we walked into the house when we got home he squirted about eight ounces worth of blue puke out of his mouth and onto the kitchen floor. He seemed more surprised and impressed by this than upset. This time around I was able to resist buying anyone candy and he only drank a few sips of the Icee, so no blue puke.
Anyway, the movie. My son has entered a phase where he asks questions about every 45 seconds whenever we’re watching something new (“is that a bad guy?”). There was some of that with Elio, but mostly he seemed to “get it” enough not to need much hand holding. His most frequent question was probably “Why are you laughing?”
That’s sort of a back-handed compliment for a kids’ movie2 — it speaks to a movie funny enough that it had me chuckling audibly enough for my kid to notice throughout, but also one with jokes that flew over the kid’s head. Some of the humor should be over his head (he’s barely old enough to be in a theater at all), and anyway, he laughed at the more slapstick bits. Overall, Elio seemed to be pretty good mix of humor levels. Oddly enough, my son’s favorite show right now is Gumball, which seems to consist of about 85% jokes exclusively for adults, but has a mix of demented animation and copious fart sound effects that somehow lulls my kid into a joyful trance even when the plot is a veiled allegory for incels or the pitfalls of the non-profit industry. That’s art.
The older kids seemed less impressed with Elio, though they enjoyed it enough all the same. As my nephew described it: “It was pretty mid.”
Adult Rating: 7.5/10
Elio follows its title character, Elio Solís, a sort-of-annoying dreamer who lives on a military base with his aunt Olga, an Air Force major who gave up her dream of joining the astronaut program in order to raise him after the death of his parents (the cause of which is never explained, but presumably a car or plane crash). Elio is both sad (how many offscreen parents had to die so that kids’ movie protagonists could be more relatable?) and, as they say, a handful. When Elio gets into trouble at school for the umpteenth time thanks to a new, even weirder obsession, his aunt consults a well-thumbed copy of A Guide To Parenting The Spirited Child.
Meanwhile, Elio’s animation itself is sort of cheap-looking, at least relative to other Pixar movies like Coco or Turning Red. It looks like the art directors were going for something Aardman-esque, befitting Elio’s goofy tone, but in trying to Pixar-ize Aardman, they both lost the lo-fi, googly-eyed goofiness of claymation and the colorful hyperreality of Pixar and landed somewhere in between. The character design gets much more interesting and inspired once Elio goes to space (the aliens are pretty great), but I understand potential viewers seeing this weird little troll kid with an eyepatch in all the marketing and not rushing out to buy tickets. Aardman characters have honky little oval noses, sort of like clowns or Mr. Potato Head, whereas most of Elio’s human characters have nostrilly stumps halfway between pig and button. Probably not the most important detail, but let’s not pretend it’s not a factor. Not as cute! Sorry!