After Watching Elio, I Have A Crazy Idea I'd Love To See Pixar Try After Years Of Teases

Animation is often seen as a medium for making “kids' movies.” To be sure, there’s something about the bright colors of an animated image that lends itself well to the sorts of stories that are most suitable for younger audiences. As such, whenever a major animation studio like Disney or Pixar or Dreamworks releases a new movie, it's viewed in terms of how it will appeal to kids more than any other audience.

But as Guillermo Del Toro is fond of telling us, animation is simply a medium, not a genre. The best Pixar movies, and the best animated movies in general, tend to appeal to a wide audience. There’s nothing about the format that requires it to be for kids, and there’s certainly no shortage of animated projects that are more suitable, if not strictly designed, for more adult audiences. This leads me to ask the question: Is it time for Pixar to make a movie for grown-ups?

Pixar’s Audience Seems To Be Getting Older

Pixar has a unique story in the history of animation. It was founded specifically to make computer animation, and that’s all the studio has ever done. While it is part of Disney, which makes more live-action movies than it does animated films by a wide margin, nobody has ever asked Pixar to do anything other than what it knows.

And for the most part, this focus on its strengths has made it one of the most successful movie studios, of any kind, in the movie industry. Four of the top ten highest-grossing animated movies ever made are from Pixar, including Inside Out 2, which became the highest-grossing animated film ever made last summer.

Most of Pixar’s most successful films are sequels, and while that may simply be a symptom of the world of franchise filmmaking, there’s also an argument to be made that the audience for Pixar films is simply getting older. While there was a time that the primary audience for Pixar films may have been kids, those kids have grown up, and that has been reflected in much of Pixar’s storytelling. Toy Story movies are no longer for the kids, but for the adults who were kids when they saw the first one.

Pixar’s Elio Is Strongest When It Focuses On Characters Other Than Elio

The newest Pixar movie is Elio. If you’ve seen the trailer, then you know the movie is about a young boy who is having trouble making his life work on Earth and attempts to get himself abducted by aliens in hopes that life elsewhere will work out better. He is successful in accomplishing half of that plan.

However, that’s not all Elio is about. It’s also a story about being a parent, or more specifically about trying to be a parent despite not having a damn clue how to do it. Zoe Saldana voices Olga Solis, Elio’s aunt, who has become his guardian following the death of Elio’s parents in an unspecified accident. A not insignificant portion of the film is dedicated to Olga, who had dreams of becoming an astronaut before becoming a de facto parent scuttled her plans.

I won’t pretend that being a parent myself, of a kid who appreciates Pixar films, and one who occasionally wonders just what the hell I got myself into, wasn’t a big part of the reason this part of Elio resonated with me more than Elio’s own story, but it certainly did. I think it’s the far stronger part of Elio’s plot than what the kid gets up to, and I wish it had been given more screen time in order to be properly developed. I would have been happy with a version of Elio where the title character was the subject of the movie, but not the protagonist.

Pixar Has Shown An Ability To Tell “Adult” Stories Before

While Pixar protagonists are often kids, or non-human characters whose age is irrelevant, Elio certainly isn’t the first time that we’ve seen more adult characters and stories take center stage in Pixar films. The protagonists of Soul and Up! are adults, dealing with adult issues, though they get paired with child characters, perhaps as a way to make the movie more accessible to younger audiences.

Director Brad Bird is on record saying Incredibles 2 is not a kids' movie. One imagines that the upcoming Incredibles 3 will follow suit in his mind. The superhero films certainly have a level of action that may not be suitable for the youngest viewers.

We’ve occasionally seen inside the heads of Riley’s parents in the Inside Out movies. Mei’s mom is a significant part of Turning Red. Even one of the OG Pixar classics, Finding Nemo, is ultimately about the father of the title character, not Nemo himself. Though in all those cases, the story is about parents understanding their children, not parents understanding themselves.

Perhaps the most “grown-up” Pixar movie was 2023’s Elemental. The movie is a romantic drama about two young adults falling in love. It’s not necessarily the sort of story your average child is going to care that much about. Maybe that was ultimately the reason Elemental flopped at the domestic box office, though I thought it was an excellent movie, specifically because of Elemental's strong character drama.

I’d Love To See Pixar Make An Animated Movie Specifically For Adults

To be clear, when I say I would love to see Pixar make adult animation, I don’t mean the movie needs to be full of adult language, violence, or sex. Although I’m also not saying such things are entirely off the table either. I simply mean I would love to see what Pixar could do with a story that was specifically geared toward a more mature audience that is not expected to also appeal to a younger one.

I would simply love to see what Pixar could do with a film that has a somewhat different goal in mind. There’s no doubt the studio can tell a mature and affecting story with only a fraction of a normal feature film runtime, so what could Pixar do if they had all 100 minutes to build a world and characters and jump into a serious drama or a rom-com? It doesn’t have to be something kids shouldn’t watch, simply something they probably wouldn’t want to.

Even if I got my wish, and even if such a film were successful, I’m not saying Pixar should stop making the general audience movies that so many people love. I love those movies too, I don’t want them to go away. I just wonder if Pixar is capable of doing even more.