Pixar’s newest film Luca is set in the sunbaked Italian sea town of Portorosso, and in the nearby Mediterranean waters where a shy young sea monster, Luca, lives with his family. Fans of The Little Mermaid might find this premise familiar—Luca’s parents forbid him from going to the surface, due to the threat of local fishermen. But there is one key twist: sea monsters are able to transform into humans once on land. Luca’s world changes when a new sea monster friend, Alberto, pulls him up to the surface, showing him that living as a human can be fun.
Luca is a solid summer watch, and one whose uniquely stylized animation will be particularly enjoyable on a large screen. It’s a nice paring back from some of Pixar’s more ostentatious, serious films like Soul or Inside Out, which took on high-minded concepts like “what is the meaning of life” or “how do we feel things.” But Luca doesn’t quite stand up to Pixar’s stellar reputation for making smaller themes feel consequential through striking characterization and storytelling. Its themes of coming-of-age resemble too much of Pixar’s existing catalog—and without a narrative that really makes these themes feel fresh.
There’s simplicity and clarity to the smallness of Luca’s world, one that matches the film’s story of friendship and exploration as a means of coming-of-age. This really comes through in the film’s world-building details, which give it a charming, local, and lived in feel both undersea and on land. At home, Luca scythes seaweed—which reads like harvesting fields of wheat—and herds bleating fish, establishing him as part of a rural, farming family. Portorosso is similarly charming, drawn from director Enrico Casarosa’s own time spent in the Italian Riviera. The town’s piazza bustles with children playing soccer, men toting harpoons from their boats, and women gossiping over ice cream.
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Annually, the town hosts the Portorosso Cup, a kind of triathlon (with a funny twist), which Luca and Alberto set their eyes on—the prize money would buy them a Vespa, which they see as a ticket to freedom. But Portorosso is also famous for hunting sea monsters and any time the boys are exposed to water—including small things like spilling a glass—they transform into their sea creature selves, and risk getting caught.
Though this premise offers lots of space for laughter, Luca and Alberto’s backstories are too thinly drawn for viewers to really emotionally invest in their friendship. These backstories are essential parts of any Pixar film, and without them Luca lacks a kind of deeper emotional core. So much of Up’s narrative propulsion, for example, comes from its moving opening sequence, which details the main character meeting the love of his life, and the desire to honor her memory after she dies. Marlon’s anxieties in Finding Nemo stay constant across the film, conveying just how much he must love his son in order to leave his anemone and chase him down. And, of course, Coco’s “Remember Me” is an instant tearjerker, a testament to just how affecting the film is.
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By contrast, Alberto’s genuinely affecting origin story is also withheld until close to the end of the film. His friendship with Luca is built quickly over inside jokes, Vespa building montages, and a kind of admiration familiar to anyone who has envied a best friend. But their relationship never quite feels intimate or lived in, thanks to withholding that vulnerability. (And while Pixar fans speculated Luca might be a queer film, Casarosa stated the film’s core friendship is purely platonic). Luca’s parents also feel dramatically overbearing when they forbid Luca to go to the surface—while the film shows the region’s threat to sea monsters, it doesn’t give Luca’s family much personal connection to that threat.
Luca’s animation style does offer a compelling argument for watching it in theaters. Casarosa’s style is distinctly warm, moving towards a more painterly feel. In Luca, Pixar’s typically photoreal techniques for environment design are swapped out for more sculptural visions of the ocean, sunsets, and rolling hills. The studio tends to create visual awe through moments of bombast—think of Coco’s incredible visual richness. Luca captures the beauty of leaving home by paring down detail, in favor of punchy framing and lighting, pulling off a kind of awe as Luca leaves the sea for the first time, gazes at the stars, or watches the sun rise.
Where environment designs trend toward the serene, Casarosa’s character designs echo the more exaggerated comedic shapes you might see in Saturday morning cartoons. This gives the film a richer comedic language to work with. Some of the character designs are particularly delightful—Luca and Alberto’s human friend Giulietta has wonderfully triangular hair that reflects the exaggerated bell bottom flare of her jeans. Her dad is designed as an intimidatingly huge, square figure. The transformation between sea monster and human is similarly primed for comedy—with Luca and Alberto scrambling to hide each other any time they’ve touched water.
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The film’s visual language also has some clear influences. Hayao Miyazaki-esque dream sequences are visually striking, and surprisingly recognizable despite the film being animated in 3d. Luca imagines himself in flight with Alberto, soaring through the sky on a Vespa in sequences that are reminiscent of Casarosa’s beautiful short film La Luna. They also bring to mind Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, a film whose title is close to the name of Luca’s Portorosso.
While pretty, these sequences are often more style than substance—especially when reflecting on Miyazaki’s usage. When Jiro Horikoshi dreams he is flying in The Wind Rises, for example, the sequence is emotionally affecting, because this man’s lifelong dream of building airplanes was achieved in the context of designing fighter planes for World War II. This isn’t to say Luca needs to be so hefty—the comparison to Miyazaki is obviously a lofty one, and Luca is a sweet summer film about self-discovery—but it does point to why Luca’s story doesn’t quite land.
Pixar is known for masterfully making smaller tensions take on broader narrative stakes. These can be goofy and still work, like Mike Wazowski and Sully risking both their health and jobs, as they hide little girl Boo, as well as risking upending the entire monster scare economy. Luca, instead, relies on well-worn coming-of-age tropes—overbearing parents, extroverted best friends—without building realistic intimacy, or explaining how Luca and Alberto fit into the broader sea monster community.
Though Luca and Alberto leave their home undersea, their story ultimately remains on the shallow end.
