Luca (Jacob Tremblay) is a young sea monster who lives off the coast of Italy, and has been warned by his protective parents (Maya Rudolph, Jim Gaffigan) to stay away from the surface and human beings. However, Luca befriends Alberto (Dylan Jack Grazer) another, slightly older sea monster boy, who lives on a deserted island and shows him the fun of breaking the rules. The pair discover that they transform into human beings when they dry off, and eventually find their way to the seaside town of Portorosso, and the yearly triathlon competition where their new pal Giulia (Emma Berman) aims to dethrone the reigning champ, Ercole (Saverio Raimondo).
Director Enrico Casarosa isn't shy about stuffing all the nostalgic Italian imagery he can into "Luca," and it's notable that his major aesthetic references are decidedly not other PIXAR films. Instead, this feels like one of Hayao Miyazaki's early features, full of gorgeous scenery and picturesque locales, that the characters explore at a lackadaisical, unhurried pace. The film takes its time to really enjoy its setting, in this case the picture perfect little town of Portorosso, where the kids are constantly eating gelato and playing soccer. There's a lot of influence taken from the sunny Adriatic vistas of "Porco Rosso." The characters are more stylized and look a bit like Aardman Animation stop-motion creations, mostly around the mouths. They behave more like traditionally animated cartoons too, with more exaggerated expressions and movements.
After years of chasing photoreal visuals, you can feel PIXAR taking a step back from realism, and it's to the movie's benefit. "Luca" is a beautiful blend of the real and the stylized. You have characters like Machiavelli the cat and Uncle Ugo (Sacha Baron Cohen), who are utterly cartoons, but are made to credibly inhabit more realistic places. Portorosso is an idealized destination, built of old memories of Italian films from the 1950s, but there's a nice tactility to the narrow streets and brightly painted buildings. And then you have all the rain and water animation, which look as good as any effects work that PIXAR has ever done. This is one of those films that I'd recommend just on the strength of how good it looks, and the kind of relaxing, idyllic atmosphere that it's able to conjure up. I wouldn't be remotely surprised if we saw a spike in Italian tourism after this.
And while it may not be to everyone's taste, I appreciate that "Luca" is not an epic adventure that deals with terribly weighty subjects. It's a smaller scale story that is mostly about a trio of kids becoming friends and growing up a little over one happy summer. Many exciting things happen, with everyone training for the big race, and the sea monster kids having to keep up the ruse that they're visiting humans from out of town, but all the stakes are fairly small and personal. It's the right size adventure for this set of characters, and I wish more animated films were comfortable enough to do this. We get a lovely resolution at the end of the story, but also a credits sequence that hints at everyone's further adventures - a format that Studio Ghibli uses frequently.
I debated over whether to say anything about the LGBT narrative that's formed around the film, which honestly feels like wishful thinking to me. The kids are all prepubescent, and their behavior isn't suggestive of anything more than platonic friendship as far as I can tell, but you can't stop people from speculating. The film is rated PG for some mild language and risky behavior - Luca and Alberto enjoy riding their homemade Vespa scooter down very steep hills - but is otherwise completely safe and inoffensive. "Luca" is easily the best kids' film of the summer, and I hope its absence from theaters won't dissuade PIXAR from making more original films like it.
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