Pixar isn’t just dithering about diversity—it has become visibly scared of children themselves.
The figure of the child collects cultural anxieties like an air filter collects dust. Children’s media has to navigate a foundational challenge: the things kids want can easily go against the things parents want. For children to have grand adventures, they often must get away from their parents. In the books I read as a child, this was usually accomplished in one of two ways: killing the parents or boarding school. (I’m British.) In Pixar films, the child usually comes into conflict with their parents over their lack of independence, initiating the film’s plot, with both parties ultimately learning from the experience and reconciling, offering the child more freedom and love in exchange for their return home. This template—the Finding Nemo model, if you will—is their go-to family story: Brave, Coco, Luca and Turning Red follow it faithfully, and it fits Inside Out and Onward pretty well too.  Elio, however, opts to kill the parents. When we meet our titular eleven-year-old, he has just become Pixar’s first fully orphaned protagonist, sent to live on a military base with his harried Aunt Olga, an Air Force major. His parents’ death has bisected his childhood into a “before” and a “now,” which is failing to become an “after”; grief has left Elio friendless and unable to imagine a future. In a sequence set to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”—perhaps Pixar’s most effective needle drop since “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” in Wall-E—we learn what Elio wants: to be abducted by aliens. This premise is so volatile that the rest of the film struggles to domesticate it. Is Elio suicidal, at least to some degree? Is there a deeper cause for his feeling unloved, his desire for escape, than an alien intelligence’s later pronouncement that he has “low self-esteem”? Olga, unable to cope with Elio’s defiant and erratic behavior, plans to pack him off to a militaristic boarding school. This is an opportune time to note that a week after Elio’s release last June, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that the film’s original director, Adrian Molina, had left the project years into development for unexplained reasons, with insiders claiming that the film was subsequently stripped of its queer themes. (Molina is openly gay.) As such, when I later went to see it—partly to see if there were early signs of an ideological shift at Pixar, partly for reasons of nominative determinism—I expected to see a straightened-out, blandly “relatable” film about a child who had been evacuated of dangerous subtext. What I instead found was someone clearly in the closet. The new Elio had, indeed, changed: he had lost his interests in environmentalism and fashion, and the rumored “pictures suggesting a male crush” in Elio’s bedroom had been replaced by, or covered by, posters of spaceships. But Elio talks like he’s received a lot of off-screen messaging about the kind of, as it were, alienating masculinity he should be aspiring to. When he sends a message to an alien ship, he lies that he’s “shredded,” and he later unconvincingly gives himself a pep talk: “You’re the alpha. You’re the killer.” Yet, when aliens finally do come for Elio, they come for him just as he’s about to be attacked by a group of older boys who have chased him through the woods in the middle of the night. Elio’s desire for a new world, the film seems to intimate, comes partly from a lack of options in this one—not just because of Elio’s loss of his parents but because of his inhospitably gendered environment.
[...] At this point, the film overplays its hand; having immersed itself in Elio and Glordon’s plight, it desperately needs to return both boys to the family, burying the specificity of their suffering and the role of their caregivers in creating it. Grigon wipes clean his years of insults and neglect with one spectacular act of love, saving Glordon’s life and uncertainly agreeing to his request not to become a warrior. “I may not always understand you, but I still love you,” Grigon says, delivering the rhetorical form of a Band-Aid for a bullet wound. Elio, meanwhile, must consider whether to stay with the aliens or to return to Earth with his aunt. The film feels tight with anxiety. Olga’s eyes fill with tears. When he chooses to go back to Earth, at least for now, his former quasi-suicidal despair is reconfigured as giving up too soon: “I didn’t give [Earth] a chance, but now I want to try. With you. We’re family.”
With this one line, Elio cuts to the heart of the creative crisis at Pixar. Hesitant to critique the military or the nuclear family, let alone venture too powerful an argument for the autonomy of the child, the writers throw up their hands: maybe the kid just needs to give hyperviolent and homophobic America a second chance. It’s not so bad, right?
