Way back in the days when Pixar would attach an animated short to their feature theatrical releases, one of the best was a little film called La Luna, which released with the movie Brave. Even among the versatility of the Pixar short films, it was notably stylistically unique and intrepid. You felt the personal touch of its’ director, an Italian animator Enrico Casarosa. Ten years later he’s finally made his feature debut for Pixar, and it’s a delight to see that his artistic vision has translated largely intact from one form to the other (it’s nice too that he seems to have brought over the characters from La Luna in a minor role). Luca is not quite like any Pixar movie preceding it. I said the same thing about Soul, and I’m glad to do so again.
At the very least it doesn’t look like any other Pixar movie. The character designs are rather particular, less logical in shape and expression and more visually interesting than other Pixar movies about humans. Their movement and action is a little more flamboyant, certain physical attributes more pronounced. One guy has virtually no eyes beneath his low-worn hat, another has an oversize moustache covering his entire mouth -only the villain, a pompous stereotype Italian egotist, looks like a typical Pixar character. I don’t know how else to describe the style but as something halfway between Aardman clay-mation and Studio Ghibli anime. That latter source is especially noticeable in not just the character designs but in much of the films’ aesthetic and even its’ tone. Numerous Pixar animators have cited Ghibli as an influence, but none have more resembled Ghibli than Luca (fitting, given that Ghibli is an Italian name).
Like some of those films, there’s a quaint atmosphere about the piece. Though it has the same kind of pacing as most other American animated movies do, it seems a bit more curious in its’ setting and its’ simple narrative. That narrative has dashes of The Little Mermaid to it, and even Wolfwalkers, as it centres on a bored sea monster shepherd boy allured by what’s beyond the surface of the water -eventually following a slightly older sea monster boy who splits his time between the two worlds. Sea monsters instinctively turn human when on land, but any interaction with water reverts them to their natural form. Threatened by repercussions from his parents, Luca and his new friend Alberto (a Huck Finn type who lives on his own) make for the nearby Riviera town of Porto Rosso (another likely reference to Ghibli) where they team up with a young girl Giulia to win a triathlon so they can travel the world on a Vespa.
The specifics sound quite elaborate, but the story is actually a very straightforward one of friendship and acceptance. The heart of the movie is the relationship between Luca and Alberto, and it plays rather nicely. Casarosa apparently based it on a childhood friendship of his own with a slightly older, more rebellious kid, and you can certainly tell it comes from this personal place. So often the character type that Alberto occupies, the “bad influence”, doesn’t get a fair shake. Luca however casts him in a different light, to the point of even subverting one of the key moments of this kind of relationship arc. And while tension does come in the form of Giulia, the smart and spunky self-proclaimed underdog who is the films’ best character, it’s not of a cliché romantic nature so much as a conflict in ambition that she brings about. Ultimately Luca and Alberto’s story is rather sweet, and a nice, healthy portrait of a friendship between young boys that Pixar has never done before.
It’s charming too that this is done on a scale that feels pretty small, especially after something like Pixar’s last effort, Soul. There’s a rather limited collection of characters in near proximity to each other, and the other great theme of the film, intolerance, is depicted as something of a local phenomenon -and one not taken seriously by the smarter folk like Giulia. Porto Rosso is gripped in a phobia of sea monsters, with just about everyone determined to find them and hunt them. The pointed metaphor then of Luca and Alberto having to hide who they are in this environment is hard to miss, and it is this that lends a very conspicuous queer reading to their relationship as well. Obviously, the Call Me By Your Name jokes have been made, what with this films’ similar setting and Luca’s resemblance to Timothée Chalamet, but while Disney still hasn’t the courage to go through with any centrepiece non-heterosexual romance, its’ notable that this is one of the only times the metaphor as it pertains to the LGBTQ community feels intentional -especially with some of the comments made near the end of the film about “not everyone accepting him”. It’s subtext, but you don’t have to look very hard for it, and that in its own way is intrepid.
Luca is funny too; perhaps not as consistently or creatively so as some of its’ fellow Pixar films, but it does some amusing new things with its animation and editing. It breaks its’ rules once in a while -when Luca’s mother makes a dolphin noise for instance her face takes on a comical 2D proportion. And the deep sea-dwelling Uncle Ugo (voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen) -a mutant version of one of those creepy angler fish from the depths- is a ridiculous bizarre creation that deserved more screen-time.
The film is a love letter to Italy, or at least a version of Italy that Pixar considers marketable, but that doesn’t make it any less appealing. There’s a very strong passion behind this one, Casarosa clearly injecting it with his own experiences, infusing specific details with some of the more generalized stereotypes. He additionally incorporates Fellini-esque flights of fancy in the occasional magical daydreams of Luca, which are a few of the films’ best sequences at illustrating the power of his desires (and of course the setting and characters recall films like Amarcord or I Vitelloni). There was even something in the music by Dan Romer that I dedicated a twinge of Morricone in -particularly his work on Cinema Paradiso. That might be stretching it, but there’s no doubt the cultural language of Italy informs a lot of this movie beyond the mere surface and that it benefits enormously from having an actual Italian behind the wheel.
I wish I could have seen Luca in the theatre. The fact that it instead dropped for free as a Disney+ exclusive has contributed to a perception that it is a weaker Pixar movie. And sure, it’s not Inside Out or Finding Nemo or Toy Story but it is still quite good and continues to foster my renewed enthusiasm for the company after so many years there of generating middling sequels. I’m particularly interested in Casarosa’s continued involvement with Pixar, they could use more artists like him.
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