Just about every human being on the planet can relate to the feelings of Elio, the title character in Disney Pixar’s new animated film opening nationwide June 20. Elio feels misunderstood, unloved, lonely, weird and wants to get away from it all. Far, far away—to another planet.
In Elio, a young boy who has been recently orphaned and lives with his aunt Olga, an Air Force colonel whose dreams of becoming an astronaut have been put on hold. Her job deals with identifying objects in the atmosphere and soon her nephew becomes obsessed with the intergalactic universe and decides that he wants aliens to abduct him.
He even plants himself on the beach every night with a message to the aliens to take him as he gazes skyward and waits for a rescue that inevitably comes.
Sure enough, Elio is spirited off in a luminous portal to a multicolored land of friendly creatures called the Communiverse where he experiences many positive emotions he can’t access on earth except for when he first became fascinated with the Voyager 7’s journey into space with recordings that typify human culture of the late 1970s.
The Communiverse is filled with representatives from galaxies far and wide and soon Elio is mistaken as the ambassador from Earth and has to prove himself.
His feeling of hope that he is fully capable of doing that imbues the tone of the entire movie.
Of course there are obstacles along the way, mostly in the form of Lord Grigon, voiced by Brad Garrett, a towering warlord whose aggression is unstoppable. But Elio makes friends with Grigon’s son Glordon, an adorable caterpillar-like creature who rebels against his father’s edicts that he will grow up to be a war machine, encased in rigid armor and giving up any emotional softness he’s developed.
But it’s just that part of the two that bonds them together in a fantastic quest to bring peace to the Communiverse.
Without any spoilers, it all leads to a moving resolution, with famed astronomer Carl Sagan’s voice reminding us that it’s only human to ponder who lies in the mysterious depths of space.
