Elio” isn’t up there with the animation house’s finest work — the glory days have been over for some time now — but it’s a fine, fizzy piece of family entertainment, overfamiliar in spots (if a story about multiple species of extraterrestrials can be called familiar) but just as overeager to please.

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

Directed with vigor and dashes of humor and emotion by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi (“Turning Red”) and Adrian Molina (co-director of “Coco”), “Elio” is laden with Easter eggs and has a killer end-credit bonus scene and pays snappy homage to numerous sci-fi films (“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” amongst others).