There is enough there to graft a queer reading onto-Luca’s doting parents (voiced by Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan) are scared about how Luca’s identity may be greeted by those who don’t understand him, for instance-but the film could just as easily be seen as an allegory for other sorts of difference. The goofiness of Luca and Alberto learning to ride bicycles and eat pasta, while trying to avoid water, is the film’s central concern any deeper probing of what the film is actually about will have to be done by each individual audience member. It’s mostly the story of a kids’ triathlon competition held in the quaint village of Portorosso, where Luca and Alberto meet a local girl, Giulia, who is also a black-sheep outlier in her staid, conservative town. The film is lovely and funny, but it operates on a more minor key than some of Pixar’s true classics. Finally, Disney might actually venture into queer storytelling, a vast landscape of human experience that the studio has only meekly (and smugly) gestured toward in recent years. That outline holds an obvious potential for queer allegory, and indeed many Pixar fans tracking the film’s development quickly labeled Luca as the studio’s “gay movie”-a coming-out story to be placed on Pixar’s mantle alongside its meditations on grief, artistic expression, loneliness, Ayn Rand-ian objectivism, and parenting.
Luca and Alberto share an intense, defining, and world-cracking-open bond, but must hide who they really are in the presence of judgmental, fearful others. If they make their way onto land, they magically transform-in appearance, at least-into humans, free to interact with the landlubbers of a small fishing town populated with whimsical characters. The film is about two kids, Luca ( Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto ( Jack Dylan Grazer), who spend most of their time as gilled and finned creatures living under the sparklingly wine-dark Ligurian Sea. That may sound roughly like the plot of Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, but it is also the story of the perhaps coincidentally named Luca, the latest bittersweet animated film from Disney and Pixar (on Disney+ June 18). In a dazzling Italy some decades ago, two young men meet and experience a sweeping, happy-sad summer of self-realization together.
0 kommentar(er)
