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    Who Directed ‘Elio?’ It’s Complicated

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    Three directors are credited for Pixar’s latest film, but not all are listed onscreen at the same time. Here’s the back story.After the emotionally resonant final moment of Pixar’s new outer-space adventure “Elio,” the names of directors Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian pop up onscreen — typical for any feature film. But if you stick around until after the mid-credits tag, you might find something curious. Once the crawl starts, another person is also listed as director: Adrian Molina.The discrepancy hints at some of the behind-the-scenes shake-ups involving the film about an orphaned boy who dreams of being abducted by aliens.Midway through production, Molina, the original director, was replaced by Shi and Sharafian. All of the listed filmmakers have history with the company. Molina was one of the screenwriters and the co-director of the hit “Coco” (2017). Shi directed the red panda puberty story “Turning Red” (2022), while Sharafian was behind the Oscar-nominated short “Burrow” (2020).During an interview with The Wrap last summer, Pixar’s chief creative officer, Pete Docter, said that Molina was moved off “Elio” and onto a “priority project that we’re not ready to talk about yet.” (Molina is reportedly working on a “Coco” sequel due out in 2029, though it’s unclear whether that’s what Docter was referencing.)Docter, in the same interview, explained that Shi and Sharafian were crucial to figuring out story beats involving the awkward Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), who ultimately gets his wish and is beamed up to an intergalactic summit by kindly extraterrestrials who believe he is Earth’s leader. “I think they’ve made some major discoveries on him that really helped the audience to connect and to move forward with the character into the second act,” Docter said.On animated films, one person often assumes the title of co-director, a role the Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton once described as a “jack of all trades.” That’s the part Molina had on “Coco.” But on “Elio” none of the listed directors have the “co” prefix.“Elio” has had a lengthy journey to the screen. The project was announced at Disney’s D23 conference in 2022 and was originally scheduled for release in 2024. America Ferrera appeared at that event and revealed that she was playing Elio’s mother. That in itself offers some clues as to what changed. In the finished film, Elio’s mother is dead and Zoe Saldaña voices his overwhelmed aunt living on a military base. More

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      ‘Elio’ Review: Pixar’s Fantastical, Familiar World

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      An orphaned boy is whisked away on a visually wondrous cosmic adventure, but he returns home with mostly reassuring lessons.Colors pop, lines flow and an alien world shimmers like the Vegas strip after dark in Pixar’s latest, “Elio,” a lackluster science-fiction adventure about a lonely boy and extraterrestrials who come in peace, except when they don’t. By turns appealing and drearily familiar, the movie offers the expected visual pleasures and characters who range from the gently exaggerated to the hyperbolic. Some have rubbery countenances and curious appendages; others have enormous eyes that water with emotion. Yours may glaze over in boredom.A morality tale with far-out friendlies and a glowering, growling Marvelesque villain, “Elio” has predictable Pixar bright spots, but the story is a drag. It tracks the title character (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), an 11-year-old who’s been recently and mysteriously orphaned. He now lives with his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force Major who monitors space junk at the coastal California base where she’s stationed. Loving yet clueless, she is at a loss on how to raise a child, especially one who’s unhappy and feels out of place with her or anywhere. (Her parenting book is studded with a rainbow of sticky notes.) Less comically, Olga is especially ill-equipped to deal with a grieving child, a failing that she shares with the filmmakers.Orphans are a storybook staple — from Disney’s original “Snow White” to “Lilo & Stitch” — though not on Planet Pixar. Yet to judge by this movie’s at times abruptly fluctuating tones and eagerness to dry every tear, Elio’s greatest issue isn’t that his parents are dead but that the filmmakers are uncomfortable with his grief. Early on, while out with his aunt, he hides under a table and weeps. Soon, though, the story has revved up, and he’s humorously sending messages into space begging to be taken away from Olga, Earth, everything. “Aliens abduct me!!!,” Elio scrawls on a beach, before lying down and grinning hopefully at the sky.After some more narrative busyness, character development and scene changes, the filmmakers grant Elio’s wish and send him off on his hoped-for cosmic adventure. One evening, while Olga is at work and Elio waits for deliverance, he is pulled from the beach on a beam of light, an image of alien abduction with a suggestively rapturous religious undertone. Once he achieves liftoff, the movie starts to as well. It grows more vividly hued and nicely unbound, and Elio is soon careering through bursts of color and graphic forms, much like the astronaut in the oft-copied lysergic star gate sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Elio predictably exits our solar system and ends up in the Communiverse, a sparkly, kaleidoscopic alternative realm where the directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi modestly cut loose. (The script is by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones.) A jumble of landscapes rich in lightly phantasmagoric embellishments, it functions as a kind of hangout and otherworldly United Nations for extraterrestrials. There, Elio zips past terrains with an array of biomorphic and geometric forms. He also, via a translator, chats up others, including a talking, floating blue supercomputer, Ooooo (Shirley Henderson), a kind of A.I. Jiminy Cricket, if one that tends to look like a dialogue bubble with eyes and a mouth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How ‘Inside Out’ and Its Sequel Became a Tool for Therapists and Schools

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      Mental health professionals and educators say the movies are remarkably helpful in providing a common language they can use with children and parents.In 2012, when Olivia Carter was just starting out as a school counselor, she employed all sorts of strategies to help her elementary-age students understand and communicate their feelings — drawing, charades, color association, role playing. After 2015, though, starting those conversations became a lot easier, she said. It took just one question: “Who has seen the movie ‘Inside Out’?”That Pixar hit, about core emotions like joy and sadness, and this summer’s blockbuster sequel, which focuses on anxiety, have been embraced by educators, counselors, therapists and caregivers as an unparalleled tool to help people understand themselves. The story of the moods steering the “control panel” in the head of a girl named Riley has been transformational, many experts said, in day-to-day treatment, in schools and even at home, where the films have given parents a new perspective on how to manage the turmoil of growing up.“As therapeutic practice, it has become a go-to,” said David A. Langer, president of the American Board of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. In his household, too: “I have 9-year-old twins — we speak about it regularly,” said Langer, who’s also a professor of psychology at Suffolk University. “Inside Out” finger puppets were in frequent rotation when his children were younger, a playful way to examine the family dynamic. “The art of ‘Inside Out’ is explicitly helping us understand our internal worlds,” Langer said.And it’s not just schoolchildren that it applies to. “I’ve been stealing lines from the movie and quoting them to adults, not telling them that I’m quoting,” said Regine Galanti, a psychologist and author in private practice on Long Island, speaking of the new film.Audiences have lapped it up: “Inside Out 2” has now grossed more than $1.5 billion globally, shattering box office records for animation along the way. Therapists say the movie’s focus on the character of Anxiety, center, takes experiences that young viewers could find isolating and makes them more relatable.Disney/PixarWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      If A.I. Is Coming for Comedy Writers, Simon Rich Is Ready

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      The author of humorous short stories finds emotional connections in tales that engage with tech. But he’s more interested in the ties between humans.The author Simon Rich believes it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence will be able to outwrite any human. Specifically, four years. So, what’s the twist?That’s what you wait for in a Simon Rich story, one of pop culture’s most consistently funny genres, with a foundation built like a classic joke: a tight premise developed in clear language, some misdirection, and then a pivot, delivered as quickly as possible.Rich, whose 10th collection of short stories, “Glory Days,” was released this week, said his dark view of the future was informed by a longtime friendship with an A.I. scientist, who recently showed him a chatbot the public hasn’t seen. It’s more raw, unpredictable, creative.“Even though I don’t know anything about A.I. really, I’ve been processing it emotionally for several years longer than everyone,” he told me in his Los Angeles home office one afternoon in May.He considered the implications of artificial intelligence displacing human creativity in “I Am Code,” a book he helped edit last year that featured A.I.-crafted poetry. The theme is also deeply woven into his new collection, his most mature effort yet, which includes some regular obsessions like “Back to the Future”-style encounters between generations, dystopia and the inner life of video game characters.“The whole book is basically about different types of obsolescence,” he said of “Glory Days,” whose other organizing theme is early midlife crisis. There’s a story about Super Mario turning 40 (Rich just did, too) and a spiky rant from the perspective of New York City itself. It’s about “the great migration when an entire generation discovers they are too old to live in New York,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Inside Out 2’ Passes $1.25 Billion Mark and Is Pixar’s Biggest Movie Ever

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      The animated film about a young teenage girl and her complex emotions has passed the $1.25 billion mark globally and is expected to keep growing.Emotions are running wild at the box office this summer. Pixar’s newest animated feature, “Inside Out 2,” passed the $1.25 billion mark globally on Wednesday, making it the studio’s highest-grossing film of all time, not adjusted for inflation. It has raked in $543 million domestically and $708 million internationally.“Incredibles 2,” which earned $1.24 billion worldwide in 2018, was previously in the top spot for Pixar, which is owned by Disney.“Inside Out 2” is also the most successful film of 2024 so far and the fourth highest-grossing animated movie ever — behind “Frozen” (2013), “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” (2023) and “Frozen II” (2019). Its profits are poised to keep climbing as it is released in more countries, including Japan.“Inside Out 2,” Pixar’s 28th movie, continues the story of Riley as she turns 13 years old and grapples with puberty and her bevy of personified emotions, now including anxiety.Directed by Kelsey Mann, the movie has a voice cast that includes Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Tony Hale, Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, Ayo Edebiri and Yvette Nicole Brown.It opened on June 14 to rave reviews from critics and audiences, who bestowed it with an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls, the same score as “Inside Out,” which made about $860 million globally in 2015. The sequel also surpassed opening weekend box office predictions, collecting about $155 million in the United States and Canada, about 70 percent more than anticipated.Since last year’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon — when “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” opened simultaneously on July 21 — the box office has been generally sluggish, without a single film achieving phenomenon status like Greta Gerwig’s smash or Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-dominating hit. “Inside Out 2” has filled that gap and is the first movie to clear the billion-dollar hurdle since “Barbie.”It was a crucial win for Pixar, which has had a wobbly run since the coronavirus pandemic started keeping audiences home in March 2020. Its film “Onward” was released in theaters on March 6, 2020, and its next three movies — “Soul,” “Turning Red” and “Luca” — went straight to the Disney+ streaming service.Last year, the original Pixar movie “Elemental” had a weak start but managed to reverse course, eventually collecting about $500 million worldwide. More

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      What Does Anxiety Look Like? How Pixar Created the ‘Inside Out 2’ Villain

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      The breakout character was initially envisioned as a monster. But when the filmmakers saw it wasn’t working, they found their way to a softer antagonist.“Inside Out 2” delivers a fresh crop of emotions for Riley, the film’s 13-year-old protagonist, who begins the story at the cusp of puberty. Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy and Ennui join the core emotions from the original film: Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness.The most consequential of the new arrivals is Anxiety, whose well-meaning but chaotic influence pushes Riley and the other emotions to the edge of mental and social catastrophe. Voiced by Maya Hawke and bursting with discomfiting character details — unruly hair, bulging eyes, a grand-piano grin — Anxiety emerges as the hit sequel’s breakout star and unstable center of gravity.In a series of interviews, the team at Pixar that brought the character to life — the director Kelsey Mann, character designer Deanna Marsigliese and animation supervisors Evan Bonifacio and Dovi Anderson — broke down Anxiety’s anatomy and discussed taking inspiration from psychology research, the bird kingdom and the produce aisle. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.What was the initial idea for the character? Who was Anxiety?KELSEY MANN, director Initially, she was a shape-shifter. She was going to be this person who was lying about who she was. I wanted somebody that was almost made of clay. Kind of a monster character, almost like a lizard. But we eventually got rid of that twist because it made the movie really complicated.In early concept art, Anxiety, here opposite Joy, looked like a monster and had a claylike feel.Disney/PixarThe character was imagined as a shape-shifter and a liar.Disney/PixarWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      “Inside Out 2” Understands How Anxiety Effects Me

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      In a way that’s both cathartic and devastating, Pixar’s latest portrays how anxiety can take hold, our critic writes.At the climax of Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” Riley, a freshly pubescent teen with a gaggle of new personified emotions, becomes so overwhelmed with anxiety that she has a panic attack.In the theater, I whispered to my friend that I’d forgotten to bring my panic attack medication. I’d said it as a joke — but at the sight of this anxious animated teenager, my whole body’s choreography changed. My muscles tensed. I pressed my right palm down hard to my chest and took a few deep yoga breaths, trying to cut off the familiar beginnings of an attack.This depiction of how quickly anxiety can take hold was overwhelming. I saw my own experiences reflected in Riley’s. “Inside Out 2” felt personal to me in a way that was equally cathartic and devastating: It’s a movie that so intimately understands how my anxiety disorder upends my everyday life.“Inside Out 2” picks up two years after the 2015 film “Inside Out,” as Riley is about to start high school. With puberty comes a group of new emotions, led by Anxiety. A manic orange sprite voiced by Maya Hawke, Anxiety bumps out the old emotions and inadvertently wreaks havoc on Riley’s belief system and self-esteem as she tries to manage the stress of a weekend hockey camp.When an emotion takes over in the “Inside Out” movies, a control board in Riley’s mind changes to that feeling’s color; Anxiety’s takeover, however, is more absolute. She creates a stronghold in Riley’s imagination, where she forces mind workers to illustrate negative hypothetical scenarios for Riley’s future. Soon, Riley’s chief inner belief is of her inadequacy; the emotions hear “I’m not good enough” as a low, rumbling refrain in her mind.I’m familiar with anxiety’s hold on the imagination; my mind is always writing the script to the next worst day of my life. It’s already embraced all possibilities of failure. And my anxiety’s ruthless demands for perfection often turn my thoughts into an unrelenting roll-call of self-criticisms and insecurities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Inside Out 2’ Returns Pixar to Box Office Heights

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      The sequel was expected to collect at least $145 million in the United States and Canada over the weekend, about 60 percent more than anticipated.Pixar is finally back in fighting form.The Disney-owned animation studio’s 28th movie, “Inside Out 2,” arrived to roughly $145 million in estimated North American ticket sales from Thursday night to Sunday, ending a cold streak that began in March 2020, when theaters closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.It was the second-biggest opening weekend in Pixar’s 29-year history, trailing only the superhero sequel “Incredibles 2,” which arrived to about $180 million in 2018.“They’re back,” David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers, said of Pixar. “This is a sensational opening.”Based on prerelease surveys that track audience interest, box office analysts had expected “Inside Out 2” to take in about $90 million in the United States and Canada over the weekend. That total would have been strong — on par with opening-weekend ticket sales for the first “Inside Out” in 2015.“Inside Out 2” sold an additional $125 million in partial release overseas, bringing its worldwide opening total to around $270 million, analysts said. The PG-rated movie cost an estimated $200 million to make and at least another $100 million to market.“Inside Out 2,” about a 13-year-old girl and the personified emotions inside her puberty-scrambled mind, received exceptional reviews. Ticket buyers gave the movie an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls, the same score the first film in the franchise received.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Inside Out 2’ Review: A Charming Sequel to the 2015 Hit

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      Anxiety meets Joy in Pixar’s eager, predictably charming sequel to its innovative 2015 hit. Sadness is still around, too, as are Fear and Disgust.When a dumpling of an old lady toddles into the animated charmer “Inside Out 2,” she is quickly shooed away by some other characters. Wearing rose-tinted glasses, she has twinkling eyes and a helmet of white hair. Her name is Nostalgia, and those who wave her off — Joy and Sadness included — tell her it’s too soon for her to show up. I guess that they’ve never seen a Pixar movie, much less “Inside Out,” a wistful conceptual dazzler about a girl that is also a testament to one of the pleasures of movies: the engagement of our emotions.If you’ve seen “Inside Out” (2015), your tear ducts will already be primed for the sequel. The original movie centers on the life of Riley, a cute, predictably spunky if otherwise decidedly ordinary 11-year-old. What distinguishes Riley is that her inner workings are represented as an elaborate realm with characters who embody her basic emotions. For much of her life, those emotions have been orchestrated by Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a barefoot, manic pixie. Once Riley’s parents move the family to a new city, though, Sadness (Phyllis Smith) steps up, and our girl spirals into depression. This being the wonderful world of Pixar, the emotions eventually find a new harmonious balance, and Riley again becomes a happy child.When “Inside Out 2” opens, Joy is still running the show with Sadness, Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) inside a bright tower called headquarters. It’s here, in the hub of Riley’s mind — an ingeniously detailed, labyrinthine expanse that’s part carnival, part industrial zone — that they monitor her on an enormous oval screen, as if they were parked behind her eyes. They track, manage and sometimes disrupt her thinking and actions, at times by working a control console, which looks like a sound mixing board and grows more complex as she ages. By the time the first movie ends, a mysterious new button labeled “puberty” has materialized on the console; soon after the sequel opens, that button has turned into a shrieking red alarm.Puberty unleashes trouble for Riley (Kensington Tallman) in “Inside Out 2,” some of it very poignant, most of it unsurprising. It’s been almost a decade since the first movie was released, but film time is magical and shortly after the story opens, Riley is blowing out the candles on her 13th birthday cake with metal braces on her teeth and a stubborn pimple on her chin. New emotions soon enter headed by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), a carrot-colored sprite with jumpy eyebrows and excitable hair. Not long afterward, Anxiety takes command both of the console and of Riley, with help from Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and my favorite, the studiously weary, French-accented Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).Directed by Kelsey Mann, this smooth, streamlined sequel largely focuses on Riley’s nerve-jangling (and strictly PG) interlude at a girls’ hockey camp, an episode that separates her from her parents while bringing her new friends, feelings and choices. (Mann came up with the story with Meg LeFauve, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Holstein.) As in the first movie, the story restlessly shifts between what happens inside Riley’s head and what happens as she navigates the world. Her new emotions find her worrying, grousing, blushing and feigning indifference, and while Joy and the rest of the older emotions are humorously waylaid at times, you can always feel the filmmakers leading Riley toward emotional wellness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More