Luca

As an adult animation fan, I greatly preferred Pixar's film from six months ago, Soul, to their latest offering now on Disney Plus, Luca.  However, I have a strong hunch that if I were 30 years younger, this would be the one I would have gravitated to.  This is a bright and colorful film with a big heart and strong voice acting, but the plot is simply not engaging, and a bit thinner than the norm from the studio.  It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it can seem awfully derivative at times.

For example, it takes a superhuman effort not to think of Disney's animated take on The Little Mermaid during the film's opening moments.  Young Luca Paguro (voice by Jacob Tremblay) may be a sea monster, but he talks and thinks like your average preteen boy, and has a strong fascination with the world above where humans (or "land monsters", as the denizens of the ocean refer to them) live.  Luca has started collecting small artifacts from the human world, unknown to his parents (Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan), who are becoming increasingly concerned with his fascination with the upper world.  It's this curiosity that leads Luca to having a fateful encounter with Alberto Scorfano (Jack Dylan Grazer), a fellow sea monster who has pretty much left underwater life behind, and now lives on land full-time, as it turns out when a sea monster walks on land, they shed their scales, and appear like humans.  Any contact with water, however, and they revert to their "monster" form.

Spending time on land with Alberto, Luca becomes more fascinated in human culture than before, especially with an Italian city that is nearby.  The two friends dream of seeing the whole world on a Vespa motor scooter, and hear about a big race that is held every year within the city with a cash prize that could lead to them buying one.  Said race includes a swimming competition (no problem for a sea monster), a pasta eating contest (a bit more trouble there, seeing they don't understand human eating utensils like a fork), and finally a bike race.  In training for the race, they befriend a tomboyish girl named Giulia (Emma Berman) who teaches Luca about the infinite possibilities of the universe beyond their world, and anger a local bully named Ercole (Saverio Raimondo) who shows up now and then to taunt them and their efforts.  There are a lot of gorgeous shots of Italian-inspired scenery, a great use of color, and a brief pit stop for a tragic backstory behind one of the kids, but that's really all there is to find here.

In making Luca, director Enrico Casarosa (a long-time animator making his directorial debut) drew heavily upon his own childhood in Italy, as well as his relationship with his best friend, which inspired the relationship between Luca and Alberto.  This does have the feeling of a deeply personal film with a heavy sense of nostalgia, and I'm sure it was a lot of fun to make for him.  The movie is also stunningly beautiful at times, and not just in its unique settings of a quaint Italian village that seems to be out of the 1950s.  The animation is vivid and flawless, but one interesting thing I noticed is the mouths of the characters.  When they are just talking, their mouths are small and round, but when they are excited for any reasons, their mouths suddenly grow and lengthen, almost taking up the entire bottom of their face.  This is a technique frequently used by the Aardman Animation Studio (Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run), and it works well here, giving the child characters an appropriately lively feature that makes their character design stand out.

So, yes, the movie is certainly beautiful to look at, but I kept on waiting for the story to hook me, and it never quite got to that point.  I was never bored, but I never felt fully engrossed.  The kid characters are kind of stock, with Luca being the shy one, Alberto being more brash and brave, and their new friend Giulia being an "underdog".  Outside of that, and a two minute sequence where we learn one of them has a sad past concerning their father, that's really all we learn about them.  As a villain, the local bully Ercole is as generic and one-note as a bully character can get, right down to the two little underlings who constantly follow behind him and put up with his abuse until he is humiliated, and they learn to stand up for themselves.  We've seen these character types before, and while they work on a basic level, the screenplay simply does nothing new.

Since the movie never quite finds a new angle for anything it's showing us, it constantly comes across as pleasant, but not exactly involving.  I'm thinking kids will respond to this more than adults will.  There are no heavy themes, and except for the bully, everyone generally gets along with everyone else.  It's a simple story about friendship, and I get that.  I just wanted these friends to have a bit more personality that goes beyond their simple types that I explained above.  And yet, I did find some elements to enjoy, as there are some truly funny moments here.  I especially like how Luca's parents go up on land to look for their runaway son, and the methods they use on the local children to try to find out if they are actually sea monsters in disguise.  Giulia's pet cat gets some big laughs also in how it is suspicious of her two new friends and their heavy fish smell.  And Sacha Baron Cohen gets a brief but funny cameo as Luca's uncle.  

I guess what I'm saying is that I enjoyed Luca enough, but I also find it hard to drum up much enthusiasm for it, as most of its joys are on the surface, or in brief moments of wit.  Compared to Soul, this just doesn't have quite the same staying power.  However, it is pleasant, sharply drawn, and the kids are all excellent in the lead roles.  Maybe I would be more enthused if I was closer to the age of the characters in this film.  In fact, I'm certain I would be.

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