Pixar trades soul-searching for star-seeking in its most whimsical — and least self-serious — original cartoon in over a decade.

If a movie is a bowl of breakfast cereal, “Elio” is Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and the audience is Calvin. The title hero is a Calvin, too: a hyper-imaginative orphaned boy who lives with an aunt and is desperate for the universe to send aliens to take him away from it all. This being Pixar, the universe obliges.

Elio,’ Pixar’s new movie about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, has its roots in a true story about one of its directors.