Luca (Dir. Enrico Casarosa, 1h 41m)

The year is 2012, and, alongside Brave, in the time honoured tradition of pairing a Disney/Disney Pixar film with a short, a tradition that stretches back to the 1950s, (and taken up by Pixar from Toy Story onwards), a charming little film called La Luna is released. Featuring three generations of Italian men in a seven minute slice of magical realism that sees them cleaning the moon of stars, it's a charming idiosyncratic mix of the Pixar style, together with influences from its creator's native Italy, and the work of Hayao Miyazaki. This charming little short is promptly nominated for an Academy Award and its director, Enrico Casarosa, promptly goes back to work at Pixar, largely working on story, including the rescue attempt on the largely panned The Good Dinosaur, before finally being given the keys to his own film, Luca, entirely animated during the 2020 lockdown, and released, with similar fanfare to last year's Soul, directly onto Disney +.

Much like La Luna, it mixes its director's childhood-much of the film takes place just a few dozen miles from his birthplace of Genoa, with its central duo based upon the director and his childhood friend-Italian culture, including its music, folklore and cinema, with the magical realism of his short-film debut. Thus, we follow the duo of sea-monsters, Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), as they traverse the hostile nearby town of Portorosso, long notorious for hunting monsters, make friends, and attempt to win over the locals, stay one step ahead of Luca's parents and win an annual race for the funds for the quintessential Italian escapism, the Vespa, and the freedom it will bring both of the boys.

What is immediately striking about Luca as a piece of cinema, is how different it feels to much of what Pixar has been doing as of late-whilst it shares some thematic similarities to, most notably, Soul, in its magical-realism story taking place in the otherwise grounded world of New York, and its story of brotherhood against odds chimes with the central drive of Onward, in terms of its story and presentation, of this strange beautiful story taking place in 1950s/1960s Italy, in animation that confidently strides the line between Pixar's usual style and a more cartoonish and stylised form, Luca stands alone.

Nowhere can we see this than in our main characters; Luca, Alberto, the duo's friend, the free-spirited and competitive Giulia (Emma Berman), and the supporting cast, from Luca's parents, and his uncle (a scene-stealing cameo from Sasha Baron Cohen as a ghoulish deep sea monster), to the rest of the town, to Guilia's colossal, if warm-hearted father, and the family cat-one of the single great cinematic felines-are brought to life superbly. Their animation is wonderfully idiosyncratic-Massimo, Guilia's father, is an imposing figure, first seen chopping fish up, and driven by his belief in sea-monsters, but far from being a brute, his movements are delicate and his beetling brows and heavy moustache eventually reveal a tender, and caring father.

On the other side, the town bully, the loudmouthed Ercole (Saverio Raimondo) is the quintesstial Italian New Wave villain, a Vespa riding blowhard, whose hunched, unpleasant movement, together with his hulking cronies, and self-aggrandising, is captured perfectly, before he says a single word of dialogue. His henchmen are suitably mismatched, and indeed, practically every character is a masterclass of character design, from the gaggle of small children, to the denizens of the world below the waves. Not only this but their designs marvellously balance Casarosa's influences, and the balance struck between Pixar's usual character designs, and the more cartoonish style of his earlier work.

But it is our heroes that capture the film's spirit most-Luca himself, once he arrives on land, and the central conceit of the sea monsters taking human form when dry, goes through a highly comic sequence of having to learn from the older Alberto how to walk, which goes from fumbling crawl to confident strides in a matter of moments. The cycling sequences, in which Luca prepares for the race, are similarly sublime, but it is in the water that the film has its true moments of estatic beauty, our heroes travelling across the bay to Portarossa in a series of jumps which sees them shift between monster and human form as they crash into and leap out of the water, the animation lending this a sense of weightlessness above and below the waves.

This, as its director succintly put in an interview with Polygon, is partly down to his background as a sketcher, a watercolour artist, a doodler. Much like Studio Ghibli's Ponyo (2009), that familiar style is broken down, simplified, expressiveness chosen over pure visual beauty, and, stunningly for a film not only made entirely via computer rather than by hand, but made in a socially isolated 2020, imperfection built into the film; realism takes a back seat to our characters' adventure. Several sequences take flights of fancy in astonishing visual direction-our heroes, once united, imagine their possession of the coveted Vespa as a ride through simplified Italian countryside, as Vespas roll over the hills to join them, whilst, learning about the planets from Giulia, imagines himself traversing the rings of Saturn, in a nod to the earlier La Luna.

But perhaps the understated star of this whole film is Italy, or at least this small slice of the Italian Riveria itself. From the film's very start, in which two fishermen come across a sea monster, is cut superbly to Italian opera, the film is practically drenched in Italian culture. Our heroes fantasise over the quintessentially Italian Vespa, and once they reach the town of Portorosso (a smart riff off Miyazaki's 1992 Italian-set Porco Rosso), the place is full of so many Italianate details, from music, with a heavy usage of quintessentially 1950s and 1960s pop-music to costume and feel, to the very scenery of the film, and, of course, food, that one cannot help but fall in love with the entire film's feel.

And it is this feel that is inherent throughout the film; its focus on this small, intimate little town and its surrounding sea only makes the film more focused, its inherent warmth and sensibility from Luca and Alberto and Guilia outward, their friendship only growing throughout the film as they prepare for the race, even as the identities of the two boys is revealed and their friendship is tested to breaking point, only to be proven once the duo come together to achieve their dream of winning the race and their treasured moped. We see this warmth, this wonderful sense of family, on this sense of community, in the hulking but well-meaning figure of her father, we see this in the slapstick comic moments of the family's cat as it suspects our heroes of being more than they seem to be.

And it is around this central trio, from the bonds between Luca and Alberto that are masterfully created in the film's opening third, before they set out to Portorosso, to the unlikely friendship between the duo and Guilia that the film's strength truly is-we see this from their perspective, and these characters are as well rounded as any of Pixar's child protagonists, as expertly written, as likable. But perhaps they're more than this. It, after all, has been compared to the 2017 film, Call Me By Your Name, similarly focused around, albeit in a more fantastical sense, the relationship between two young men, one sheltered, one outgoing.

Perhaps it's a tenous link taken too far, not to mention the questionable nature of Call Me as a piece of cinema in general, but one has to ask the question that surrounds this film-is this, even as subtext, Disney's first film with LGBTQ+ heroes? Certainly one can read the brotherhood of Luca and Alberto, the intense care for each other, and the feeling of abandonment felt by Alberto when Luca becomes interested in Guilia, as at least queer subtext. Perhaps, more than this, the idea of having to hide your true self, of struggling for acceptance, of finally being accepted by a tolerant community once the bully who whips up the group into hatred is vanquished, cuts to the heart of the queer experience as few live action films have done.

What Luca is, in short, is a fairytale as only Pixar can tell them, a superb blend of Italian culture and folklore and cinema and music, a tale of two boys searching for acceptance in a village that hunts their kind, of a boy finding his feet and voice and himself away from overprotective and disapproving parents. It is a triumph of animation, of, astonishingly, one of the biggest studios in animation taking risks, embracing imperfection, to make a piece of cinematic art from spare rooms and studies across America.

But more than this, Luca is Pixar firing on all cylinders, on their best streak since the early 2000s, in a charming small scale homage to Italian cinema and culture, by way of Ghibli at their best, that tells the story of mismatched underdogs from beneath the waves making good in 1960s Italy.

Rating: Highly Recommended

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