Elio (2025)

Elio was so damn cute. I was grinning from ear to ear for most of this. It's imaginative and fun and playful, with absolutely delightful characters. 

I suspect some are tiring of hearing about this, but I argued in my book Love Is Love Is Love and I say all the time that Pixar movies (and most animated movies in general) are about the queer child and about parenting, and... Elio is no exception. The two queer children at the film's center are misunderstood by their parents, who have trouble connecting with them and can't figure out what to do with their very strange kids. This is usual for a Pixar movie—cf. Inside Out and its sequel, Turning Red, Luca, Soul, Elemental, etc.—but what is different about Elio is that although parenting is in focus here, the experience of the child is much more important to the narrative. The parents are still the heroes in this, but what I love about Elio is that it articulates the way the child wants to do more, to be more, indeed to be an adult or not be treated like a child. 

Perhaps disappointingly, Elio is also deeply invested in the biological family rather than (as I also discussed in Love Is Love Is Love) the chosen family politics that permeate films in the 1990s. But this is not too big of a deal, and the film tries to strike a balance between friendship and family that I appreciated. 

In any case, this is really really fun and super charming. And I adored little Elio and little Glordon. 

P.S. The name Elio puts me in mind of the young Elián González, whom the U.S. treated as an alien. More importantly, perhaps, the film riffs on "aliens" and US Latinos in a clever but not overtly political way. This is a film in which the US Americans in the film are Latinos and the "aliens" are somewhere else.