REVIEW: Luca

 

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 titular Luca is a sea monster fascinated by the surface world (even harvesting its discarded trash) despite his overprotective parents' cautions about the hostile humans who live there. Don't get ahead of yourself--Luca's call to action isn't rescuing the human prince from drowning, but rather befriending Alberto, another sea-monster with a little more daring. Together, the two of them share their mutual fascination with the human world and decide to run away there. (They can do that because sea monsters can disguise themselves as humans when they're out of the water.)

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 movie's greatest strength is how fluently it speaks the language of childhood simplicity. Alberto describes the magic of the vespa in such a way that makes perfect sense to a kid like Luca who's still discovering his inner thirst for adventure, "You just sit on it, and it takes you anywhere you want to go." 

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.

That's most everything in this film, actually: soft, pleasant, and enrapturing. Like a nice scoop of gelato on a hot day. Or a summer daydream about biking across the country. Or childhood in general.

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.

The voicetalent threads nicely with the animated performances, owing largely to the casting of mostly fresh actors like Emma Berman as opposed to popular icons. I had to keep reminding myself that Luca was the kid from Room and Alberto the kid from Shazam!. The only performer whose off-screen persona threatens to overwhelm the character is comedian Maya Rudolph.

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