Elio is Pixar's best, most beautifully brilliant movie in a decade. Too bad it will probably bomb

As a film, Elio is gorgeous. In short, it's a somehow equal parts miraculous and original wonder — so good it feels a bit out of place among a summer of adaptations, remakes, sequels and remakes of adaptations of sequels. 

Perhaps not that last one. But it is hard to ignore the benefits of Elio: Pixar's animation style (which seemed stuck in a perpetual state of diminishing Toy Story returns) has never looked more fluidly beautiful — especially when used to create a tapestry of glittering nebulae and spaceships.

Its characters come to life with originality and heart — none more so than its heart-breakingly damaged namesake, 11-year-old Elio Solis, a space-obsessed child trying his very best to provoke an alien abduction rather than running from one.

Brushing past some of its almost too kidd-ish qualities, Elio achieves almost shocking levels of originality, beauty and terrifying tragedy that do more than earn it the title of modern classic.

That said, it's probably going to bomb. 

There are more than a few reasons why that's the case for Pixar's latest release, and buckle up, because it all comes quickly. 

We're introduced to the movie's heroic, pint-sized namesake with the narrative equivalent of a sledgehammer to the skull. 

Elio is a silent, terrified child hiding under a restaurant table, worrying the laces of oversized shoes as he tries to spontaneously phase out of existence rather than acknowledge his aunt's futile attempts to coax him back to his chair. It's a lost cause though.

We soon learn that Elio (Yonas Kibreab) has just been orphaned, and his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is the unfortunate, too-young-for-this stopgap, burdened with unwanted parenthood she doesn't have the life skills to handle — especially while juggling her job as a major in the U.S. Air Force, overseeing an array of telescopes scanning the skies for space debris. 

But Elio's no slouch. As he wanders off into the base, he's more than aware he's the one thing a child fears most — the primal, instinctive fear that eventually evolves into the scattershot assortment of neuroses we call a personality: being unwanted. 

And as he stumbles into a conveniently-placed exhibit on Voyager 1 — the 1977 probe launched with a golden record, information about life on Earth and hopeful greetings for alien species — we suddenly get the animated equivalent of Citizen Kane's Rosebud. 

Lying on his back, gazing slack-jawed at a glittering star-show about humanity's search for friendly intelligence in the lonely and infinite cosmos while a single tear pools on his cheek, he understands: if no one wants him on this planet, he'll go looking for one that does want him.

But it also does more. This latest offering from Pixar has finally arrived in theatres after a year-long delay and a wildly shifting strategy, possibly resulting from its fraught behind-the-scenes trajectory.

The result is a disparate, possibly alienating tonal melange of a UFO movie — somehow even more disorganized than that congressional hearing on UFOs we are all somehow fine with having happened.