The animated movie Elio is currently showing on screens worldwide. Created by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures, it tells the story of a boy who attempts to contact aliens and succeeds. The main theme of the movie is the question: are we alone in the Universe?
Elio
On June 13, the feature-length animated film Elio was released in cinemas. It was the third attempt by Pixar, which has been collaborating with Disney Pictures for mйany years, to venture into the science fiction genre.
Pixar usually works with fairy tales and is a recognized master in this genre, as it knows how to convey something that will be useful for children. At the same time, adults can watch it without feeling embarrassed about explaining the jokes to their offspring.
The third Pixar sci-fi film, like the first two, is directly related to the theme of space. And while WALL-E is considered an undeniable success in this regard, critics consider Lightyear to be more of a failure, although it was not inherently flawed.
People are already saying that Elio is a failure. And if you look at its box office, it is hard to argue that it is indeed the worst product Pixar has ever made. But let’s take a closer look at it and see if it is that bad.
Plot
The plot of the cartoon is not very original in itself. There is a boy, Elio, who lost his parents and lives with his aunt Olga, who works in a space debris tracking team and dreams of going into space.
Elio’s relationship with his aunt is not very friendly, and he is at least as guilty as she is. Instead of establishing relationships with anyone on Earth, he dreams of making friends with aliens.
That is why he tries to send radio signals to them using methods that earn him a black eye. But the aliens eventually come to him and take him to a space station that looks like a schoolboy’s dream of an amusement park that will never exist on Earth.
And the space society itself professes the principles of peace, friendship, and blowing bubble gum together. They mistake Elio for the ruler of the Earth, and in order not to lose all this happiness, he will lie to them that he is.
Then the story introduces the caterpillars in exoskeletons, hung with all kinds of weapons, which the whole space Disneyland is afraid of. Elio promises to deal with them, adventures begin, his lies are revealed, and Aunt Olga is drawn into the story, but in the end, Elio saves everyone, including the warlike caterpillars, who turn out to be not so much conquerors as fans of military traditions and shooting as a way of entertainment. Eventually, he returns to Earth with his aunt.
Are the bad guys really bad?
If all of the above sounds a bit naive, you are not wrong. The plot of Elio is really based on a whole bunch of assumptions that cannot be taken seriously. There are aliens whom the protagonist managed to fool so well, and their helplessness in the face of danger. And this danger itself is in the person of Lord Grigon, a preoccupied man who suddenly starts showing off his shooting skills to the alien and reveals the problems he has with his son.
After all, this is a story for children. It should not contain long intrigues and philosophical explanations of why the “space Disneyland” is hiding from the geese in spacesuits instead of giving them a fight.
At one point, the creators of the cartoon explicitly show that Elio’s view of the world is naive, because no matter how obsessed with her problems Aunt Olga may seem, she ignores the fact that her nephew has been replaced by a clone just as much as she refuses to notice it.
But in general, this does not make the plot less naive, and in principle it could be forgiven, because the main purpose of this is to show children that “no one loves me, so I will pretend to be someone else so that I can be loved. No one will notice anyway” is a very bad idea.
However, there is one moment when the naivety of what is happening on the screen crosses the line of reason. And this is the image of Lord Grigon and his people. The authors very skillfully write them out so that it is clear that they are not evil, they want to be friends, they just like to shoot a flamethrower and spend their entire adult life in battle armor. But the main thing is that they are not bad guys!
There are no complaints about the space geese in the movie. They are indeed serviceable in the story. But in real life, peaceful people who simply love war and violence are much more fantastical than someone with high technology who is unable to defend themselves.
More precisely, heavily armed supporters of the war say they want peace. But even if they are sincere friends with you, this is not a reason to be calm about your own life, because they may have a very specific idea of what this friendship should look like. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people in the world who love their children less than they hate their neighbors or worry about how they will look in the eyes of others in terms of traditions. And this is where Elio’s naivety becomes dangerous.
Are we alone in the Universe?
However, one should not say that Elio is about nothing at all. After all, the main question he poses is very apt. Is it not because we are so stubbornly looking for brothers in space that we feel lonely on Earth?
And at the same time, can someone who cannot find friends in space find them on Earth? People are becoming more and more distant from each other. More and more people are lying for the sake of popularity. As a result, we feel lonely even in a crowd.
Therefore, it is possible that the search for aliens will not help us overcome our loneliness. Before we look for them, we should think about whether they want us to find them. In the cartoon, Elio still managed to become less lonely both on Earth and in space. To see how this happened, the cartoon is still worth watching.
