Pixar’s Inside Out 2 was the biggest film in the world in 2024, so hopes were high for the studio’s next cartoon. Those hopes crashed down to earth when Elio was released in June. It wasn’t that the film was terrible, but it was fatally compromised. A science-fiction coming-of-age adventure, it was conceived as a personal story by Adrian Molina, the co-director of Coco, who was inspired by his own lonely childhood on a military base. But then, in 2024, Molina left the project, along with other key personnel, to be replaced by two different directors. The result was a cartoon that no longer had a compelling reason to exist; as with two other recent Disney flops, Strange World (2022) and Wish (2023), it was tricky to summarise the plot or to explain what was at stake. The film might have been better, it seems, if Molina had just been left to get on with it. Ultimately, the Disney alien that made a fortune this year was Stitch from Lilo & Stitch rather than any of the bug-eyed extra-terrestrials in Elio.
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