Pixar's newest feature film, Luca, landed on Disney+ this weekend, prayerfully the tail end of a long train of theater-bound movies booted directly to streaming in response to a global shutdown. The motivations for this particular change are still mysterious. Perhaps it was a necessary measure to ensure that the film still made some kind of summer release.
That would certainly make sense. Pixar's latest film is sunshine in a bottle, a child's forgotten midsummer dream, and it's bound to become a rite of summer for many a cinephile.
The land of scooter-bike races, pasta, and starry nights enthrall our underground (underwater?) monsters, especially when they strike up an alliance with the spirited Giulia who enlists them in her quest to vanquish the town bully in the annual vespa race. But the fragility of it all is never lost on the boys. Not with Giulia's fisherman father, the brooding Massimo, and his hawkish cat watching their every move. Not with the entire village on the lookout for sea monsters. Their dreams of escape, like their secret identities, like their very friendship, hangs by a thread.
This reflects in the animation as well. Trading in the fine texture of a movie like this year's Raya and the Last Dragon, Luca imagines a living postcard that manages to be both abstract and tactile. The softer design of this world plays more naturally to a younger, though not necessarily more juvenile, audience than a film like, say, Ratatouille.
Regrettably, that doesn't always work in the film's favor. There's a little too much narrative coasting at work here. Characters make decisions more in response to the demands of the plot than their own natural psychology. The best friends seem to have an internal clock that tells them when it's time to have that good old end-of-second-act squabble and when it's time to reconcile, whatever their on-the-record characterization does or doesn't demand.
I've heard the film marketed as an oceanside Stand By Me, and the connections aren't hard to see, but I can't help but dispute that claim just a little. The aforementioned is a lament on the end of childhood. While there's still growth to be had for Luca in his film, Pixar's latest film doesn't see maturation as purely the playground for adults. Even after he's "grown up," Luca still has a long stretch of childhood ahead of him.
Maybe that's the most impressive thing about this movie. It manages to find that one sliver of summer sun that stays all year and all through the years.
--The Professor
Haven't seen this one yet, but your comment about "the language of childhood simplicity" is provocative to me. While, as an older man, I long for the simpler life and the innocence of childhood, yet, at the same time, films that remind me of it largely make me melancholy for what has passed and what may never be recovered. Even reading your excellent review about a movie I've yet to watch left me with a sense of how wonderful life is when it is youthful and innocent--and how challenging it can be once the "real word" enters the picture as we near adulthood or suffer loss/tragedy.
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