Many adults, and even plenty of kids, have fond memories associated with Pixar -- both its celebrated classics and its lesser-known gems. Either the original Toy Story was your comfort film as a kid or you showed it to your kids hoping they'd take to it. And if you were lucky, they inherited your good taste in Pixar's early animation.
General opinions on the studio's creations have soured in recent years, and there are many reasons why that could be the case. But with Elio's opening weekend seemingly missing the financial mark despite it being an okay movie overall, many of us find ourselves asking once again: Where is the Pixar we used to know and love?
Because Elio is, despite plenty of positive ratings and reviews, strictly fine. It follows a fairly predictable Pixar storytelling formula, one the studio is pretty well-known for at this point. Most importantly, it sticks to its commitment to being a movie intended to attract families to theaters at the very start of summer. But it seems to lack in something pivotal to Pixar-level success. It just doesn't bother to say anything interesting or new.
There are plenty of potential reasons for that, too. Disney has completely lost interest in telling interesting, original stories. The company looks only at numbers, sees the money-making potential of sequels and live-action remakes, and it has decided that anything that doesn't fall into that category might as well not exist at all.
Elio likely fell into the production category we'll call "too far along, can't quit now." Disney had already decided movies like it weren't worth making, but too many years and dollars had already been invested. So it had to be finished, and released. Perhaps the concept of an outcast kid finally finding a place where he belongs is very Pixar in a good way, but its execution doesn't live up to the high standards many of us still hold Pixar's movies to. It could have been great, but it's instead just all right.
And I don't know what this means for Pixar's future, immediately or years down the road. Because we will never get another Turning Red, Coco, or Luca or Elemental. Soul? Forget it -- unless someone were to decide a sequel was warranted. (It isn't.) Let's go back to where we started: Stories about white kids, or white-coded characters, doing normal everyday White People things. Don't even get me started on the fact that Inside Out's star will likely be "confirmed straight" in the next sequel. And if it's not a sequel or a prequel or some kind of distorted spinoff, it's probably not going to happen.
This won't impact just Pixar, of course, but looking at this studio specifically, it's perhaps the most tragic example of what happens when business executives trade faith in creativity for their obsession over profitability. Elio is likely falling flat for a dozen reasons, but it's not just the CEOs and CFOs who have stopped believing in Pixar's ability to still create magic. It's all of us. We've stopped rushing to go see the new movies. Even me. Whether or not we'll ever get another masterpiece to truly root for is the biggest mystery of all.