Luca, review: Pixar’s shortest, sweetest story in a very long time
Dir: Enrico Casarosa. Voices: Jacob Tremblay, Jack Dylan Grazer, Emma Berman, Marco Barricelli, Saverio Raimondo, Maya Rudolph, Jim Gaffigan. 6+ cert, 101 mins
In all kinds of ways, Luca is the smallest film that Pixar has made, but it’s also unquestionably one of the studio’s loveliest. For their 24th feature, the animation house known for sweeping metaphysical escapades – think Inside Out, Wall-E, Coco – has drifted off nowhere more existentially jolting than a picturesque fishing village on Italy’s Ligurian coast. The peeling posters in the square for Fellini’s La Strada and Wyler’s Roman Holiday suggest the period is the mid-1950s, although it could just be one of those places in Italy that never quite dragged itself out of that decade, and is contentedly bobbing along with one foot in the past.
Did I say “foot”? Make that “flipper”. The village, called Portorosso, is where two young lads by the names of Luca and Alberto pass a formative summer together with a twist: the pair are not mere boys, but mer-boys, from a colony of sea monsters who live beneath the bay’s twinkling waters. It’s the footloose and gregarious Alberto, voiced by Jack Dylan Grazer, who coaxes the more anxious Luca (Jacob Tremblay) out of the surf and onto the dry land his parents warned him about.
Surrounded by air, their shimmering scales turn into freckled skin with a subtle visual flourish that resembles face paint being dabbed on in reverse. At first the two just mess around together – it’s hard to recall the last time the plot of a major animated film wasn’t hammered down, but just allowed to sprout – and dream of travelling the world together on a Vespa, which strikes them as the most glamorous form of transport imaginable. Again, this being the era of Roman Holiday, they’re not wrong.
After venturing into Portorosso itself, they befriend Giulia (Emma Berman), the tomboyish daughter of the town fishmonger, whose name, gutsy personality and even the way her hair spills out from under her hat all feel like fond tributes to the great Italian actress Giulietta Masina, and are among the many light nods to the country’s cinematic golden age.
Speaking of which, the trio also make a minor enemy of Visconti: not Luchino, director of Death in Venice and The Leopard, but Ercole (Saverio Raimondo), who must be the most stylishly dressed teenage bully in the children’s film canon. The salmon pink sweater knotted around his shoulders exhibits sprezzatura that would impress Marcello Mastroianni – who makes a cameo of sorts – never mind Toy Story’s Sid. Of course it is imperative that Alberto and Luca remain dry at all times, thereby ensuring their very literal fish-out-of-water status is kept under wraps. And when this becomes unsustainable, a moment of panic leads to an affectingly staged, sickeningly plausible betrayal.
Such moments are about as high as the stakes ever get in Luca – which, at a slender hour and a half without credits, is the shortest Pixar feature since the original Toy Story in 1995. But to assume this makes it a minor entry in the studio’s canon would be a mistake. Rather, it’s simply a film about minors: its dramatic currents are all of the pre-teen variety, and are no less heartfelt or engaging for it. (In fact, the only place where more padding might have been welcome is around Luca’s parents, who are amenably voiced by Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan, but underwritten to the point of feeling generic.)
Even so, Disney has seen fit to release Luca on its Disney+ streaming platform only, even though many of its breezily beautiful sequences are crying out to be experienced in a cinema. Along with his team, director Enrico Casarosa has put a tactile spin on Pixar’s visual house style that lends the characters an almost resin-like solidity that contrasts amusingly with their more realistic surrounds, and gives the well-wrangled slapstick sequences an appreciable extra bump and snap.
It pays off especially well in the bicycle-riding sequences that bookend the film: first Luca and Alberto’s clattering descents down a hillside in joyful seclusion, then later as they race for first place in the local triathlon, in which the other activities are swimming and eating pasta, and discover in the process that keeping their true selves hidden away is no way to live.
The moral wins no points for originality, but is handled by Pixar with typical sophistication and nuance, as Luca and Alberto begin to sense the possibilities of life beyond their own private world. As for Ercole’s dastardly attempt to steal first place, it’s naturally thwarted into the bargain. He might have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those pesce kids.
Luca is on Disney+ now
