Three Ruminations on the Themes of Elio

Alex saw Elio and had some thoughts

I know that this blog has already covered Elio, but I have had scattered thoughts about some of its thematic depths. The first part of this essay is a response to the review my colleague and dear friend Arturo Serrano wrote on this site regarding that film. He is an astounding critic and one I deeply admire (and I’m working with him on a shared world project), but there is one particular aspect of Elio that I feel his piece does not consider. It is regarding Olga, the aunt of the titular character, and how she fits into the broader narrative of the behavior of parental figures in regards to their children. Secondly, I consider the fate of the third child in the film that is thrust into a role that he does not want. Thirdly, I consider a parallel between Olga and Grigon that the writers almost certainly deliberately did not address.

Arturo makes the case that Elio is an inaccurate depiction of children who rebel against their parents (or parental figure, in the case of Olga, who is his aunt, and who stepped up after his parents died in an unknown event). He argues, basically, that Elio is rebelling against her because he sees her as abusive, and that the film agrees with him, even when Olga didn’t do anything wrong. He therefore argues that the film is wrong to condemn Olga for doing what anyone in her station would do.

This is where I disagree with my colleague and friend. I would argue that the film is not portraying Olga as an abuser. Consider all of this from her perspective. We do not know if Olga ever intended to have children, but in any case, she lost a sibling and the sibling’s spouse in some sudden awful event, and at some point must have realized that she must take over caring for her nephew very suddenly. She appears to be single, and she has a demanding job with the United States Air Force. I can very much imagine Olga having a conversation with Elio that resembles a conversation in 2025’s The Monkey, directed by Osgood Perkins, where two brothers who have likewise lost their parents are taken in by their uncle and aunt. There is a scene where the uncle point-blank tells his nephews that he and his wife never expected to have children, are inexperienced in the art of parenting, and should adjust their expectations accordingly. I can easily imagine a more tender, less wry version of that talk some years before the events of Elio. It is also similar to 2022's M3GAN, where Gemma is an aunt who is struggling to take care of a sibling's child; that film is very good at showing that exhaustion, and brings it down a horrifying direction.

One of the things that I think ought to be considered regarding why Elio wants to escape his life with Olga is the broader situation of his familial arrangements. Raising a child is hard. Raising a child by yourself, without a partner, is even harder. Raising a child without a partner while working a demanding job for the United States Air Force is harder still. It is, then, quite easy to imagine that Olga is running on fumes, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and after a certain point she has only so much to give, and that those points come with disheartening frequency.

When put in that context, I think a comparison with another recent Disney film regarding the treatment of parental figures is relevant. I refer to the 2025 live-action remake of Lilo and Stitch, which I have previously reviewed for this very blog. One of the things I praised that film was for explaining how difficult it is for the teenaged Nani, living in poverty and having suffered the loss of her parents, to take care of her little sister Lilo. Nani is slowly being ground down, having to forfeit a promising future to ensure her sister can survive. Without the intervention of close family friends (an intervention entirely absent in the original animated film), both Nani and Lilo would be sentenced to lifelong poverty. 

Elio made the mistake of not making the weight of all this on Olga obvious enough. What the film risks imparting, especially to younger viewers, even more especially girls, is to portray women with a certain martyrdom complex. Reading between the lines, one could argue that the film is portraying Olga as naturally a mother by virtue of being a woman. She is frustrated with her nephew, yes, and she wants her nephew to be a bit more orderly, yes (as so clearly demonstrated by her choice to send him to a military school). Perhaps more clearly, she wants him to be a bit more normal.

This is a bit of a side note but I think in one particular aspect the film really fumbled a very obvious way it could have solidified its central theme: that of the fake Elio the aliens sent to take his place. So much of this film is about what parental figures want of their children, and this fake Elio is designed to disintegrate. To put it more bluntly, the Communiverse has created a sentient being with the express purpose of dying when it is convenient for them. Despite being a clone and a tool, he is a character in this movie. He has significant screen time, and is the instigator of a number of important moments in the story, and yet he is never given the chance to come up with an original thought. Instead of contemplating this fact, he allows himself to disintegrate, making a Terminator reference in the process, and does so to allow the protagonists to continue in their adventure. One child in this movie is ordered to be normal, and another is ordered to be violent. A third child, however, is literally ordered to die. It would have required ripping the guts out of the film to accommodate this, or maybe bringing it up to the length of a TV show, but it was such obvious thematic content that is just left at the wayside. Letting a child die in this way while others got to live left a bad taste in my mouth.

In terms of thematic potentials left unaddressed, there is a very obvious one that the writers missed in terms of contrasting Olga and Lord Grigon. Grigon serves a murderous, militaristic empire that cares little for life; that much is clear. What is less clear, when taking in the film’s framing as perceived by an onlooker, is that Olga also serves a murderous, militaristic empire that cares little for life, namely the United States military. Can you truthfully say that a military whose ultimate antecedents are genocidal militias in colonial times, and is currently leveling Gaza, cares about life?

I know that such things would never get into a children’s movie. I know that Disney takes plenty of money from the American military. I know that Disney is committed to a vague midcentury form of patriotism that likes to pretend everything is fine and dandy. I know that Disney, ultimately, is simply not brave enough to challenge American empire that openly. I know that this film had advisors from the military. Ultimately, though, the film is still portraying a menace to the world as benign, and ultimately good. Fighting Kessler Syndrome is undoubtedly good, but it ultimately comes off as akin to the time when America conquered Veracruz and focusing on when American doctors fought syphilis in that city. It’s a good act, yes, but it came out of a very particular context, and that context is not one of altruism.

The United States has ratified the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the militarization of outer space. The United States also has laws preventing it from providing weapons to governments committing genocide, and yet it does so anyway. Unfortunately, as long as the world is divided into competing empires, I expect the Outer Space Treaty will be about as effective as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was (indeed, the wide variety of objects cluttering the atmosphere may well violate the treaty in itself). What I worry is that many adults who may be firing those weapons at whatever poor country may come in America’s crosshairs, at poor, defenseless children, will have entered that grisly service because they saw Elio in theaters and were enchanted by space, and by the military.

On a basic narrative level I enjoyed Elio. I did, however, leave the theater feeling like there was fertile soil to have done even more with what had been laid out. The whole film, while enjoyable, felt like a massive missed opportunity to explore issues it merely raised. I know that this is wishful thinking and in one instance not particularly likely due to the interests of Disney as a company. But it stood out to me all the same.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: Elio

Disney loves to write orphans, but doesn't seem to understand them

Recently orphaned Elio Solís has been adopted by his aunt Olga, who has a busy military job and had to give up a chance for career advancement in order to take care of him. She's struggling to adjust, but hasn't said one word that would imply she resents him. Still, he feels unwanted and unwelcome. This misunderstanding on his part sparks an entire allegorical journey in which he meets a distorted mirror version of himself (no, I don't mean the clone) and learns that he isn't as alone as he thought. The message is sweet and valuable, but the way it's expressed through the narrative is sometimes muddled, which is unfortunate in a movie that focuses so much on efforts to communicate.

What sets things in motion is Elio's visit to a space museum where he learns about the search for alien life. After reasoning that there's no one on Earth who loves him, he becomes obsessed with contacting aliens, hoping to be taken by them. Any viewer who grew up with terrible parents will recognize this fantasy of adoption, but it's hard to understand in Elio's case, because his aunt is in no way whatsoever mistreating him. It's Elio who convinced himself that his presence is bad for her life. He takes too long to figure out that her choice to pause her career plans is not something he inflicted on her but something she willingly did for his benefit.

All right, she does make one mistake: she signs him up for a summer camp that teaches military discipline, which ranks very, very low on the list of things you should do to a kid who already feels lonely and expects to be abandoned. He soon gets dragged into a fistfight with other kids, which the movie treats as a pivotal moment in the course of his life.

From this point on, the emotional trajectory of Elio is best understood by placing in parallel the plotlines of the human kid Elio and the alien kid Glordon. They don't even meet until well into the runtime, but Glordon's story is basically the heightened, hyper-dramatized version of Elio's. From Elio's perspective, Olga has dumped him in that military summer camp because she's had enough of him, and also because military life is all she knows. In Glordon's case, his father, Grigon, is an interstellar tyrant who expects him to one day wear the battle armor that is traditional in their species. The armor is full of a ridiculous variety of deadly devices, and it hides, constricts and pierces the creature's soft skin. It's meant to be worn permanently. What this prospect means, when translated back into Elio's life, is that he has before him the option to deal with his complicated feelings by squeezing them under a mask of toughness. But the kind of person who would make that choice, as the movie illustrates rather literally, is not Elio's/Glordon's authentic self. It would be a disturbingly people-pleasing version of him. Olga wants a polite, obedient child, as the warlord Grigon wants a ruthless conqueror, but that's not who Elio/Glordon is.

Where this beautiful allegory falls apart is in the manner of its resolution. Elio's injury from the fistfight at the summer camp shows Olga that she was wrong in trying to steer him into her steps; Glordon's almost-death shows Grigon that galactic conquest isn't worth losing his child. The problem here is that Elio is the one who needs to change his incorrect beliefs (the movie even literalizes this point by giving him an eyepatch during the entire second act to represent his limited perspective), but the allegorized version of his struggle has the parental figure be the one who learns a life lesson (notice how it's the battle armor which has eyes, in the manner of a reverse blindfold, while the actual alien body has none). The emotional resonance is pointed in the wrong direction. Grigon's neglectful, harsh style of parenting is not the proper translation of how Olga behaves toward Elio. A charitable reading would say that Grigon stands for Elio's distorted idea of Olga, but even in that case it would still be Elio who needs to learn and grow. This thematic misfire brings to mind the better execution of the same dynamic in The Lego Movie, where the villain and the father follow neatly parallel arcs.

Despite this confusion in the handling of its ideas, Elio is not without highlights. A thrilling scene in which Olga and Elio have to pilot a spaceship through floating debris reaches a triumphant peak when they get unexpected help from random strangers, which is a better thematic conclusion to Elio's yearning for a community where he fits. Maybe he won't join the diplomatic elite of the universe, but there's plenty of excitement to be found on Earth.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Close your eyes and enter Dream Productions

Turns out you can give yourself an epiphany without being quite sure how you did it

Dreams aren't stories in the strict sense: they don't proceed from an authorial choice, don't follow an ordered causal progression, and don't express a deliberate stance on their theme. Only the most surreal category of stories would include the semi-random free association carnival our unconscious minds are capable of spitting out. But dreams do have some sort of secret logic, a symbolic language that is unique to each of us. Because they're generated from our own thoughts, they can never tell us something we don't already know. It's just that sometimes we need to be reminded of an obvious truth.

The world of Inside Out is the perfect venue for that kind of exploration. In the limited TV series Dream Productions, a school dance approaches, and our girl Riley is going through the messy balancing act between her childish whimsy and her drive toward maturity. Unsurprisingly, the forces inside her head are working full-time to process those complicated feelings. The surprising part is how neatly the dreams-as-stories metaphor corresponds to the inner conflict.

In the abstract mindspace of Inside Out, dreams are made in a movie studio with a limited repertoire of plots and an unlimited VFX budget. We meet scripwriters, actors, directors, stunt performers, camera operators—but let's not forget these homunculi are actually fragments of Riley's mind. The cutthroat rivalries and artistic disagreements that drive this series are meant to represent unconscious urges that are channeled into dream imagery. The question troubling Riley is whether she has enough social competence for teenage activities; she loves fun, but she's terrified of being perceived as uncool. Her mother's less-than-ideal choice of dress for the upcoming occasion triggers a whole week of disturbing nightmares she needs to sort out on her own.

What adds a level of meta awesomeness to this premise is that it lets us witness (albeit very indirectly) the creative process at Pixar. Since its foundation, the studio has been praised by its strong grasp of emotional stakes; when you go to the movies for a Pixar production, you know you're going to end up crying, and you're looking forward to it. You love how Pixar makes you cry. You love how it seems to understand you so well. That is the degree of insight that Riley's inner movie studio has about her.

The use of dreams as a catalyst for self-knowledge and growth will be immediately recognizable to viewers familiar with The Cell, Paprika or Inception. Where Dream Productions sets itself apart is in the argument that we can learn from our dreams even if we don't remember them. And here the connection between dreams and stories is especially relevant. Maybe you grew up watching Pixar movies, but do you remember everything that happens in them? What Pixar seems to be telling us in Dream Productions is that what matters in their stories isn't their plot, but the emotional imprint they leave upon us. What stories do for us is something deeper than provide models to follow or cautionary tales. They suggest ways of feeling we hadn't considered. They test our stated values. They teach us to be human.

As if that weren't enough substance, Dream Productions adds yet another meta level: the series is told as a mockumentary where Riley's homunculi talk to the camera. Who is supposed to be filming this and interviewing Riley's unconscious? Who are these characters addressing? Go figure. Like in Diego Velásquez's painting Las Meninas, you're invited to put yourself at the center of this piece of art. You're meant to participate as a character in the story, but the world of the story is a slice of you. You're watching yourself watch yourself.

And here Dream Productions finally reveals the ace up its sleeve. I won't spoil how this plays out, but if you connect the idea of dreams as an improvisational form of storytelling with the idea of deliberate introspection turning its gaze on itself, you'll probably guess what I'm talking about. As I've said a thousand times on this blog, the best stories are those about stories. And Dream Productions draws you into an infinite page of potential plot, the text of which comes from a pen your hand is holding.

That is the hidden lesson of every story about dreams: you need to become aware that you are their only author, and you have always been.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Inside Out 2

More colors, more drama, same beats, same stakes

After successfully guiding a girl through her first identity crisis and her first complex emotions, Joy and her color-coded coworkers are now in charge of a teenager. And with growth comes even more complexity: not only is this teenager a lot more sensitive and volatile; newcomer Anxiety leads a whole new team of additional emotions that promise to make the next few years the rollercoaster all parents dread. What kind of person will she become? How will her conflicting impulses settle into a (hopefully) stable personality?

As it turns out, this time the inner journey is basically the same as last time. Her core emotions are shunted into her unconscious, they go on a tour of metaphoric locations inside the girl's mind, Joy learns that she's been following a counterproductive routine of suppressing all unpleasant thoughts, and the next step toward maturity consists of accepting a more multifaceted and adaptable identity. It seems that in the universe of Inside Out growing up means having to relearn the same lesson again and again.

Except for Joy, who strangely hasn't assimilated what she was supposed to have learned in the first movie. She's still nervously pushing away bad memories in order to steer the formation of a hyperoptimistic sense of self. She pays lip service to acknowledging the importance of Sadness in a healthy mind, but she has put herself in charge of selecting which thoughts are allowed to matter. Now that the girl they're guiding is a little older, a new module has appeared in her mind's headquarters: the self-image, which emerges from all the beliefs she holds. When Anxiety shows up to threaten the status quo, it's already highly anomalous on its own.

One of the traits of great storytelling is the mirroring of the large conflict and the inner conflict. The worldbuilding of Inside Out is uniquely equipped to make this correspondence literal. We watch our girl's increasingly ill-advised choices as Anxiety grabs more and more control over her. In a funny homage to 1984, there's even a scene where Anxiety has turned into a Big Brother figure with all-seeing tools to anticipate every disastrous scenario. This is fully realistic: if Anxiety takes over, we become its slaves. Our girl is well on her way to a panic attack by the time Anxiety has finished seizing the mind's headquarters.

The rest of the mind, alas, is not so imaginatively portrayed. The first movie explored at a leisurely pace the mechanisms of conceptualization, dreams, and memory processing; in the sequel, what we get is a literal treatment of brainstorming, the stream of consciousness, and the dark recesses where secrets hide. There's nothing to criticize as regards the technical side of digital animation, but nothing to marvel at either. It's perfectly adequate Pixar, but it doesn't bring any visual innovation.

What does land impressively is the subtext in the script. Joy has been so deliberate in pruning this mind's development that, were it not for the chaos of puberty, she'd easily lead our girl to a narcissistic personality disorder. After Anxiety's coup, however, she starts quickly building toward a dependent personality disorder. Both are based on a distorted, because incomplete, model of the self: Joy only wants to allow happy thoughts, while Anxiety is hyperfocused on winning approval. What the mind needs is neither of these single-party regimes. We need to let ourselves contain multitudes.

While the conflict is interesting, the resolution is too familiar. Just as Joy eventually agreed to stop trying to control everything, so does Anxiety. Last time, we learned that it's unhealthy to try to ignore Sadness. Now we learn that we also need just a teeny bit of Anxiety in our lives; as she explains at the start of the movie, her task is to anticipate and plan against disaster. The irony is that redirecting all mental resources to one single task also leads to disaster.

Inside Out 2 has the curious problem of presenting a simple conflict with an overcrowded cast. There are brief hints as to the role of Envy in fostering self-improvement, of Embarrassment in correcting course after mistakes, and of Ennui in cutting through unnecessary complications. The obstacle when attempting to expand this story is that there are only so many ways you can keep saying that it's unhealthy to let one emotion rule, that we need to open ourselves to the fullness of the human experience. Unfortunately, Pixar will have to keep finding ways of saying it, if one goes by Disney's plans for future productions. All right, it's time for some Anxiety. Let's tremble.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

When Charry Met Soggy

Pixar's latest production boasts the usual artistry you know to expect from the studio, but the story it tells is generic and forgettable

As anthropomorphized allegories go, it's hard to do better than Inside Out or Zootopia. Their capable handling of theme, characterization, tone, pacing, worldbuilding, humor, dramatic stakes and background design set a standard of excellence that Disney/Pixar are now cursed with having to live up to every time. Their newest film, Elemental, is the quadrillionth romantic comedy about star-crossed youths from incompatible families, and feels like an unambitious retread of better movies. Although its message of love and unity is sorely needed in these divisive times, the execution fails to satisfy.

It's not impossible for a story to be about many things, but Elemental struggles to integrate the various points it wants to make. It falls into the all-too common trap of focusing on an individual happy ending that makes no difference in the existing social structure. One woman made of fire and one man made of water manage to unlearn the usual stereotypes about each other's people and form a successful couple. But the rest of their community doesn't benefit from their example. Prejudice against fire people stays unchanged, the fire neighborhood is still neglected by the municipal authorities, and the derelict infrastructure that causes massive damages each time a ship sails by is still not fixed. Even more damningly for a movie that wants to address xenophobic segregation, the details of the allegory fall apart. There are very logical reasons why anyone would be wary of people made of fire; a plea for mutual acceptance rings false when one of the parties is an ongoing menace to everything they touch.

Ember, our protagonistic fire lady, might as well have been a redhead for all the tired stereotypes written into her: she's short-tempered, energetic, volatile, and dangerously unstable. Her character arc reduces to admitting that she's lying to herself about her true aspirations, and until she achieves that goal, she'll continue to be a literal walking timebomb. Not a bad concept in general, but we've watched enough romantic comedies with the trope of the overemotional woman who needs to calm down. Her romantic plot, which is sold to us as the focus of the movie, isn't as touching or believable as her relationship with her parents. She's a doting daughter, mindful of her responsibilities and appreciative of the effort her parents have made to rise above hardship. The inner conflict between her sense of duty and her need for fulfillment mirrors every second-generation immigrant story ever made, but would have made for a more interesting movie than the watered-down romance we got.

The emotional flow of the movie is hindered by the very strange rhythm it follows. The first scenes go by at breakneck speed, as if desperate to get past the infodump. This is not like the opening montage in Up, which does cover decades in minutes, but treats each emotional beat with respect. Here the montage is edited as if it were a "previously on" segment that needs to mercilessly cut inessential seconds to get the story proper going. This tendency to avoid lingering, to not let the audience breathe, reoccurs at key moments of the story, causing a whiplash effect when a thoughtful scene is instantly followed by action. On the other hand, the rhythm of quiet but intense scenes is interrupted by badly misplaced flashbacks that hit like a digital glitch in a song. There's no acceptable excuse for a narration done in fits and starts to extend well into the second act.

Although the city where Elemental is set harbors a fabulous variety of creatures, we don't get to know them outside of short, groanworthy gags. The different buildings, streets, houses, public squares, shops, and vehicles hint at fascinating divergences in usability needs depending on whether the user is made of, say, air or earth, but the richness suggested by the setting is relegated to quick glimpses. The animators created a vast, elaborate space that the story has no time to show us. This kind of oversight is a headscratcher, especially coming from the same artists who lovingly boasted every corner of Zootopia.

And yet, the part of the story where the movie focuses the most attention, the boy-meets-girl drama that upends the whole worldview of its society, is the least interesting thing about it. Bland, predictable and shamelessly derivative, this romance has all the spark of water thrown over fire and all the spice of wet ashes. That this civilization took so many centuries until someone finally figured out that personal contact was possible between fire and water people is an unintentional but clear sign of how little thought went into the writing of this story. A much better movie could have been made in the same setting and with the same characters, but the script of Elemental gives them too little to do that is worth watching.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Lightyear doesn't fly, but it falls with style

A character from a lost past trying to earn a place in the future is the perfect metaphor for the Toy Story franchise

Think back to the first time you saw Buzz Lightyear. It was 1995. Digital animation was young and full of promise, talking toys were young and full of promise, Pixar was young and full of promise. Understandably, you were wowed.

Now picture yourself when you next met Buzz. It was 1999. The excitement was still fresh, the story was solid, the twists were earned, the magic was still there. You loved it.

Then came the moment to say goodbye to Buzz. It was 2010. By then, you were more mature, and so was the plot, and there were tears, and hard moments, but you learned a form of bittersweet joy you didn't know you needed, and in the end, you felt lucky to have lived through an era of cultural history.

And yet, somehow, Buzz returned. It was 2019. You weren't sure what more these characters could teach you, but, surprisingly, these symbols of abandoned fantasies pulled off a moving argument for the inexhaustible power to create new fantasies with the tools at hand. You were glad to have had a last chance at reunion.

At each of these reappearances, you were a different person. Buzz was the same, because plastic is made to last for centuries, but you were going through different stages in your relationship with toys, with cinema, with the animated medium, and with allegories of growth via fantasy tales. You aged past Buzz. Each time he came back, he had something important to say to you. But now you take your child, maybe your grandchild, to watch Buzz.

Once, he was a central part of your life. Now he's merely a cherished memory.

Can Buzz Lightyear still mean something in this century?

Pixar's clever dance step around the question of nostalgia rot is to pretend that this is not a new take on the character, but the original version that prompted the mass production of the Buzz Lightyear action figure in the first Toy Story film. It's really a simpler concept than it sounds like, even if its plot engages in deliberate dialogue with a legacy it's not supposed to be aware of, and its metafictional existence within the Toy Story universe opens the way to disturbing implications (if this is supposed to represent a live-action film, is the robot cat prop a sentient toy?).

For the first third of the film, Buzz follows an arc comparable to the breezing summary I've just provided of Toy Story's presence in the lives of audiences: in order to test an experimental hyperspeed fuel, he jumps further and further into the future, becoming an increasingly occasional presence, desperate to maintain meaningful connections, and ultimately retired as a relic as soon as priorities shift. Not unlike the show Quantum Leap, Buzz keeps repeating the same flight test over and over, each time hoping to finally get it right.

Here Buzz displays the same fundamental character flaw as in the 2000 tie-in film Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: a misplaced sense of responsibility that makes him consistently refuse help until it's undeniable that he needs partners. Buzz's spiral of isolation, propelled by his determination to get the mission done, because he's a masochistic self-blamer who has no sense of purpose without a mission, feels like familiar territory already visited in the 2000 film. That's as far as characterization can go in a story like this. As is tradition in many of the space swashbuckling fantasies that served as indirect inspiration for this movie, Buzz is not so much a character as a template for viewers to project themselves onto. For the actual movie Lightyear that you're watching in 2022, this is a scriptwriting problem. But for the fictional movie Lightyear that Andy watched in 1995, this is exactly how you sell toys.

The internal mythology of Buzz Lightyear draws from every science fiction franchise you can remember, complete with evil emperors and captain logs, but Lightyear's influences do not get integrated in a cohesive manner. Once Buzz makes his last jump into the dystopian future threatened by Emperor Zurg, the plot starts feeling like it's losing its grasp on a clear direction, and his stubborn insistence on doing everything alone overcomplicate scenes that could have been resolved with less drama.

At its core, Lightyear is the story of a veteran coming to terms with the passage of time and his shrinking place in the story. Buzz's encounter with Zurg signals that the pursuit of an imagined life runs the risk of making you forget the real one you're having in the present. Much has been made of the, frankly, minuscule queer representation in the movie, which may distract from the more obvious plot point that Buzz doesn't truly leave the past behind until he equips his starship with a rainbow gemstone.

The quest for continued relevance is a preoccupation that the movie assigns to both Buzz and itself. It tries to evoke the feel of the Flash Gordon serials and, of course, both of the big Star franchises. But instead of the now-common practice of attempting to recapture an old moment of wonder via repetition and allusion, this movie gave itself the harder task of pretending to be that first experience. Although the villain's big plan involves the return to an idealized past, Lightyear is not a case of nostalgia (because anything it could try to revisit is supposed to be provided by this story for the first time), but of pastiche. It may be unfair to cast Pixar as a victim of its own spectacular successes, but Lightyear is certainly not the best that the studio is capable of, and at times it's a stretch to imagine small Andy being blown away by it.

That brings us back to the issue of nostalgia. Toy Story 3 taught us that it's healthy to let go of the symbols of your childhood. So it's not clear who Lightyear is for: is it for the now-adult generation that grew up with the Toy Story movies, or is it for the younger generation that is only now discovering them? If the answer is the former, there will be little new material to surprise veteran viewers; if the latter, it's doubtful that somewhere there's an Andy who will be so enchanted by this story that he'll make Buzz Lightyear his new favorite toy. As in the movie, the time of Buzz is passed.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the adorable robot cat Sox.

Penalties: −2 for giving Buzz the same emotional arc he already went through in the 2000 film.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

'Turning Red' finds joy in the scary messiness of puberty

What do you do when you don't recognize your body anymore?

One day you wake up and find you've grown hair in weird places. Now you're smelly. You're also taller, and with your new proportions you're bumping into things all the time. You notice that certain feelings cause involuntary reactions in your body that you'd rather nobody would see. You're suddenly capable of things you didn't know you could do, but what if someone gets hurt? Will things go back to normal? Or is this supposed to be normal? What if your friends notice? What if your parents notice?

There's a primal terror to puberty, a volatile sense of strangeness and confusion and vulnerability. Just when you think you've got yourself figured out, your genes kick in and change all the rules.

Disney/Pixar's new animated movie Turning Red takes this metaphor of puberty as transformation and situates it in the no less stressful context of the immigrant experience during the rise of digital mass media. If being a teenager is hard, it's almost unbearably so when inherited traditions and expectations conflict with multicultural openness and pop culture sex symbols. When protagonist Meilin Lee learns that the women of her family have the power to transform into enormous red pandas, it feels like it couldn't have come at a worse time: she's busy enough pleasing her parents and excelling at school and daydreaming about boy bands without going all Katie Ka-Boom every time she gets emotional. So she panics, and tries to hide what's happening to her, and pretends to be in full command of her feelings—but her inner animal won't be tamed. There's no denying the call of nature.

American pop culture has usually cast a benevolent eye on teenage boys, embracing and celebrating their exploration of desire. Not so with girls: somehow, the mere notion of young female desire still befuddles a certain segment of the audience that refuses to make an attempt at empathy for half of the human species. That a movie about the female body dares to talk about menstruation should not be the cultural milestone that it is.

It's unfortunate that we can no longer discuss Turning Red without addressing how Sean O'Connell embarrassed himself all over the internet because this movie gave him cooties. There's not only the theme of womanhood: O'Connell failed to see how this movie advances a necessary conversation about Chinese parenting, particularly Chinese immigrant parenting, and it's a conversation in which we in the dominant Western culture need to step back. What this movie has to say about Chinese families is something only a Chinese artist is able to say, even though the emotions involved are ones we have all felt, and that's why it's invaluable that movies like this get to exist.

Leo Tolstoy said, "If you want to be universal, paint your own village." Meilin's experience inhabiting the culturally hybrid space of Toronto (a reflection of director Domee Shi's own experience) is central to the themes of Turning Red, because her heroic journey is about reconciling legacy and possibility, duty and independence, reputation and experimentation. To me, the most symbolically powerful moment in the movie is when Meilin's efforts to detransform in her bedroom shake the entire house and almost break a framed photograph in the living room. Her mother rushes to save the picture and places it back on the wall, and in that moment we get a brief glimpse of the photograph: it's a much younger Meilin, looking cute and inoffensive. That's the emotional core of the story: the commotions of adolescence threatening to break the image of the adorable child.

Meilin's victory lies in finding, as her father advises, room for all the sides of her identity. She's a member of a holy lineage, and also a teenager of the 2000s. She's Chinese, and also Canadian. She's sweet, and also wild. She doesn't have to split herself. She can be all she is.

Puberty is every bit as terrifying as it is exciting, and Turning Red is aware of that complexity. In Western culture, red is the color of danger. In Chinese culture, it's the color of celebration. Meilin's first step toward maturity is to acknowledge both.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a final kaiju fight that is a perfect representation of every mother-daughter fight.

Penalties: −1 for not devoting more time to exploring why Meilin's family repeated their choice to give up their wild side.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.