newest movie is a fantasy about sea monsters coming onto land, but it’s rooted in authentic childhood memories. Director Enrico Casarosa (who previously made the Pixar short La Luna) based Luca on his own childhood summers, and the result is a movie that brings in fantastical elements, but also evokes specific emotions tied to coming-of-age stories.
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Enrico Casarosa’s “Luca” is effectively the Disney+ equivalent (read: non-alcoholic version) of an aperol spritz on a late summer afternoon: sweet, effervescent, and all the more satisfying for its simplicity. At times, “Luca” is so modest, so restrained, so not about sentient action figures or a family of superheroes or the nature of the human soul that it almost doesn’t feel like a Pixar film at all.
Pixar’s “Luca,” an Italian-set animated fairy tale concerning two young sea monsters exploring an unknown human world, offers the studio's hallmark visual splendor, yet fails to venture outside of safe waters. After story artist credits on big-time Pixar titles like “Ratatouille” and “Coco,” “Luca” serves as Enrico Casarosa’s first time in the director’s chair. Borrowing elements from “Finding Nemo” and “The Little Mermaid,” Casarosa’s film follows two young Italian sea “monsters,” Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer). The former spends his days shepherding the little fish populating his seabed village away from fishing boats. But at night, as he lies awake in his seaweed bed, he dreams of living on the surface.
Luca follows two young sea monsters. The titular Luca (Jacob Tremblay) is curious, yet timid. His burgeoning interest in the human world has been squashed by overprotective parents. Fearless Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), meanwhile, lives on land and encourages Luca to be more daring. The two run away to a human town, dreaming of buying a Vespa and seeing the world. With a chance to win enough money to buy their prized moped, the two join up with Giulia (Emma Berman), the fishmonger’s daughter, to compete in the annual Portorosso cup, a triathlon where instead of a running leg, competitors eat pasta.
Alberto and Luca form a quick bond.
They dream of buying a vespa and traveling the globe together. Their plans nearly come to a halt, however, when Luca’s frightful parents threaten to make him live his oddball Uncle Ugo (Sacha Baron Cohen, essentially using his Borat voice in a fish) in the trenches. Instead, Luca runs away with Alberto to the town of Portorosso. There, they come across Giulia (Emma Berman), a red-headed, independently minded tomboy with dreams of winning the Portorosso cup—a traditional Italian triathlon consisting of swimming, cycling, and eating pasta—and her one-armed, burly father Massimo (Marco Barricelli). In a bid to earn enough money to buy a Vespa, the boys pair with Giulia to win the cup away from the evil five-time champion Ercole Visconti (Saverio Raimondo) and his goons while an entire town lays a bounty for sea monsters on their heads.
Luca’s central plot is pretty straightforward, with the three kids competing in a race, while Luca and Alberto hide their identities. But that just allows the relationships between the characters to take center stage. What starts out as a simple friendship between Luca and Alberto grows into something more complicated when Giulia enters the picture. It isn’t a romantic quandary at all. Instead, Luca plays with the idea that anyone can have different emotionally satisfying relationships with different people, while acknowledging how hard that can be to accept.
Luca’s story is simple, but it works so beautifully. Much as Casarosa pushed the bounds of Pixar’s in-house style, he also played with the storytelling format that the studio has done time after time, to varying degrees of effectiveness. Luca isn’t trying to make people cry, the way some Pixar movies now feel obligated to do, but it still rings as a bittersweet experience. Instead of a tearjerker, it’s a fond memory, a soft sigh after a recollection of a time gone by.
Available on June 18 on Disney+.
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