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Luca (2021)

Over its history, Pixar Animation Studios has been best known for its high-concept storylines and fully-realized fictional settings. The studio’s less memorable fare occurs when such high concepts get ahead of themselves, interfering with character development. So it comes as a bit of surprise that their newest feature, Enrico Casarosa’s Luca, elects to relax the worldbuilding and intricate plotting in favor of capturing the fun of a youthful summer in coastal Italy. This is less challenging material than the typical Pixar movie, its personalities too lightly characterized. But in the moment, these developments were not bothersome. Luca’s simplicity – a tribute to Casarosa’s (2011 short film La Luna) childhood summers in Genoa – builds upon the strength of summer friendships that outlive season’s end, however long that may last.

Somewhere off the Ligurian coast is the sun-kissed town of Portorosso (an amalgamation of the Cinque Terre and a reference to the eponymous character in Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso) lives Luca Paguro (Jacob Tremblay), a sea monster. Luca, along with parents Daniela (Maya Rudolph) and Lorenzo (Jim Gaffigan), herd goatfish for their livelihoods. For as long as Luca can remember, he has been warned to beware the world above the water. Eventually, Luca runs into fellow sea monster Alberto Scorfano (Jack Dylan Grazer), and learns that sea monsters take human form when they emerge from the sea and return to their sea monster form upon their return. When Luca’s parents learn about his adventures, they threaten to send him away to his abyss-dwelling uncle (Sacha Baron Cohen). But Luca runs away with Alberto to Portorosso – they want to be where the people are – in hopes of securing a Vespa motorbike (it’s the same brand Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn puttered about Rome on during 1953’s Roman Holiday) and excitement. There, they meet and befriend Giulia Marcovaldo (Emma Berman), her fisherman father Massimo (Marco Barricelli), and run into trouble with the town bully Ercole (Saverio Raimondo).

If one is looking for high dramatic stakes, thematic complexity, or rich character development, Luca is not that film – another departure from what we have come to expect from Pixar. Luca, Alberto, Giulia, and Ercole remain largely the same children as when we first meet them (Luca, in particular, is a very reactive character and is not well-defined). Our youngers, Ercole excluded, are all framed as dreamers – all-too-standard stuff for children’s cinema. The adults that populate Luca don’t have much dimension to them either, whether they be overbearing (Luca’s parents), carrying an intimidating façade (Massimo), or grouse at the childish antics stirring in the cobbled town square. Maybe one should not expect much from a town where little happens, other than the annual children’s triathlon (somebody should try to convince World Triathlon to consider changing the format of triathlon to what is seen in this movie) that makes up the movie’s climax.

This is a film primarily about personal freedom – the freedom to make one’s own life choices, unbound by the expectations set upon oneself by others. The double lives that Luca and Alberto lead conflict constantly with Portorosso’s fishing-heavy economy (if this film was set in modern times rather than the 1950s, the town would have fashioned itself into a shlocky tourist trap by now) and the expectations from the adults inhabiting the sea below. Portorosso’s small-town xenophobia and the sea monsters’ cultural fear of the above constricts Luca’s options – a greater and more compelling drama than whatever juvenile rivalry he and his friends against Ercole. That Luca allows all this to occur with a threadbare plot by Pixar standards sometimes makes the movie feel a tad aimless (a development that I enjoyed, but may cause some unease in other viewers), like any childhood summer without too many responsibilities. In the Pixar filmography, Luca’s screenplay – written by Jesse Andrews (author and screenwriter of 2015’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) and Mike Jones (2020’s Soul) from a story by Casarosa, Andrews, and Simon Stephenson (2017’s Paddington 2) – represents the least high-concept movie that the studio has undertaken. The lack of ambition thematically and narratively is not a point of umbrage, but it is a pleasant change of pace, if nothing more.

The photorealism of The Good Dinosaur (2015) and especially Soul is absent in Luca. And its underwater effects are cartoonish in comparison to Finding Dory (2016). For Portorosso and the Mediterranean seascape surrounding it, the animators bathe the scenery in golden, mid-morning and mid-afternoon sunshine. Credit those who worked on the lighting effects, namely lighting designer Daniel López Muñoz (character designer on La Luna and 2017’s Coco) and technical lighting lead Nick Bartone (almost all Pixar films since 2010’s Toy Story 3), for the sublime visuals. The sunlight appears almost to start from the outlying mountains, sweeping down from the terraced farms filled with lemon trees, olive trees, and vineyards, and into the town itself. Portorosso is an Italian Riviera town – albeit more idealized and sanitized than the actual ones sitting on the Ligurian coast – not yet touched by the global tourism industry, and the lighting contributes to this sense of a workaday, proletarian community with natural paradise incidentally encircling it.

In terms of its character design, Luca resembles a peculiar (and unsuccessful) attempt to meld the character design found in the supporting characters of Hayao Miyazaki movies and the current dominant style in American character animation, disparagingly and controversially known as “CalArts face”. “CalArts face” is named after the private art university in Santa Clarita, California and involves – as of the 2010s and early 2020s – a sloped head and a bean-shaped mouth that makes the jaw very flexible. This reviewer is not here to litigate the accuracy of the term or its supposed offensiveness to those who attended CalArts (namely, as CartoonBrew’s Ami Amidi once put it, “nearly every other middle-aged white male who directs animated features today”), but it is a useful shorthand for the next few sentences. The CalArts face is inherently a comic affectation, that exaggerates humorous situations or moments and to endow the character with a toothy grin that takes up a third of their face. Ubiquitous though it is (especially in American children’s animated television), this style of character design fares poorly when other emotions – anger, regret, sadness – are in play. And even when a character is smiling, this facial design feels even more rubbery in CGI, resulting in expressions not capturing as much emotion as they should.

In addition to the visual tributes to Miyazaki, Casarosa also pays tribute to Italian cinema. Some of the great Italian directors set many of their films in coastal provincial towns where little happens. Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948) and Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) and especially I Vitelloni (1953) influence the proceedings in Luca. There’s also a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it appearance of a La Strada (1952) poster in the town square, alongside Roman Holiday and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Others have remarked upon the use of magic in Luca as another reference to Fellini’s career, but I don’t find such comments holding much credence. The films incorporating fantasy in Fellini’s career (as his career progressed, Fellini strayed away from Italian Neorealism into more dreamlike cinema) – beginning with 8½ (1963) and also including Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and Roma (1972) – are of a more autobiographical surrealism or of the occult. Luca is a Disney-influenced fantasy film that, because of the subject matter (sentient sea monsters chasing their dreams in the human world), is required to be a fantasy film. In contrast, Fellini’s fantasy and fantasy-adjacent movies, in respect to their basic narrative (e.g. in a basic synopsis of 8½, the film’s main character has director’s block struggles to overcome it) need not have had fantasy elements. The nature of fantasy in Fellini’s films and Casarosa’s Luca are markedly different, with little relationship between the two.

Another attempt to harken to Fellini’s films was through music, notably by having the music resemble that of longtime Fellini collaborator Nino Rota (La Strada and Amarcord). Casarosa chose composer Dan Romer (2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, 2016’s Jim: The James Foley Story) after his first choice, Ennio Morricone (the Dollars trilogy, 1988’s Cinema Paradiso), died in July 2020 (if he were alive to accept, he would have been the most suitable composer for Luca). In his compositions, Romer attempts to channel both Morricone and Rota, but his music – due to his indie rock background and occasional use of electronics (which sound out of place for a movie set in the ‘50s) – never quite latches on the extremely melodic, romantic scores that both of his inspirations were known for. The closest Romer comes to that melodicism is Luca’s motif, first heard in “Meet Luca” (at 1:36, played by solo flute with strings almost entirely playing pizzicato and accordion harmonies) and most prominently near the end of the cue “Telescope”. But despite the prominence of Luca’s motif and even Alberto’s motif (listen to their beautiful melding in “That’s the Dream”), the score does not leave much of an impression.

Instead, Romer’s score tends to take a backseat to some of the ‘50s Italian pop songs sprinkled across the film for purposes of montage: Edoardo Bennato’s “Il Gatto e la Volpe” and Mina’s “Cittá Vuota” in particular, in addition to Gianni Morandi’s “Andavo a cento all’ora” (which essentially serves as Ercole’s theme). Romer’s score is light, thematically interesting in parts, but it is disappointingly overshadowed by the use of Italian pop in Luca.

Luca’s release to the Disney+ streaming service in all territories where the service was available marks the second straight time a Pixar movie has bypassed a theatrical release (save a weeklong run at the Disney-owned-and-operated El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood) for a streaming-only debut. The decision has rankled Pixar staffers, as it essentially limits the potential audience for the film. Certainly, Disney+ has seen a successful release wherever it is available, but this approach punishes those without reliable broadband and stinks of corporate meddling. Though the streaming service prominently advertised Luca’s uploading to its catalogue, one cannot help but feel that Luca becomes just another movie in the anti-curatorial ocean of endless thumbnails.

Just like La Luna before it as his directorial debut, Luca is a safe, unchallenging feature directorial debut for Enrico Casarosa. The lack of artistic risk-taking seems antithetical to the Pixar Animation Studios that animation fans have become so familiar with. Yet, with the viral uncertainty that continues to grip the world, movie viewers have retreated largely to the comfortable and the familiar. Luca’s timing, with all that in mind, is impeccable. It is a portrait, however imperfect, however idealized and fantasized, of carefree summers that once were, that may never come again.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

#Luca #Pixar #Enrico Casarosa #Jesse Andrews #Mike Jones #Simon Stephenson #Jacob Tremblay #Jack Dylan Grazer #Emma Berman #Saverio Raimondo #Maya Rudolph #Marco Barricelli #Jim Gaffigan #Dan Romer #My Movie Odyssey

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Simon Stephenson. Set My Heart to Five. Hanover Square Press, 2020.

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Programmed to be a dentist, Stephenson’s protagonist heads west, unleashing wry observations along the way.

Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson

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A first look image of Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy in new film “Louis Wain,” which has started shooting, has been released by Studiocanal. Stacy Martin and Hayley Squires have al…

A first look image of Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy in new film “Louis Wain,” which has started shooting, has been released by Studiocanal. Stacy Martin and Hayley Squires have also now joined the project, which is a co-production of Sunnymarch and Shoebox Films for Studiocanal, Film4 and Amazon Studios. The film is currently shooting on location and in-studio in and around London until mid-October.

The biopic stars Cumberbatch as the eponymous English artist who rose to prominence at the end of the 19th century; a brilliant man inspired by both his love of the world and the love of his life, Emily (Foy). Wain was famous for his distinctive paintings of cats and was also an inspirational hero who defied obstacles throughout his life.

Martin, recently seen opposite Natalie Portman in “Vox Lux,” and “I, Daniel Blake” breakout Hayley Squires have joined the cast, alongside Sharon Rooney and Aimee Lou Wood, as Wain’s endearingly eccentric sisters. The cast also features Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones, Adeel Akhtar, Julian Barratt, and Asim Chaudhry.

First announced in July, “Louis Wain” is directed by Will Sharpe from a script Sharpe co-wrote with Simon Stephenson. Sharpe was BAFTA-nominated for best scripted comedy for 2016 sitcom “Flowers.” Guy Heeley, Adam Ackland, Leah Clarke, and Ed Clarke serve as producers.

The film is financed by Studiocanal, Film4 and Amazon Studios. Amazon will release the film in the U.S. Studiocanal is handling international sales and will release the film in the U.K., France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand.