In a dazzling Italy some decades ago, two young men meet and experience a sweeping, happy-sad summer of self-realization together. 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).
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
Of course, all of that would have to be done on kid-movie terms. Thus the sea monster metaphor, tempered and universalized by Pixar’s usual cutesy, cozy trappings. Having seen Luca—directed by Enrico Casarosa and written by Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones—I think the film will probably half satisfy those excited theorists.
The film is lovely and funny, but it operates on a more minor key than some of Pixar’s true classics. 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 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.
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 boys’ washing ashore brings to mind the recent immigration and refugee crisis gripping Europe, as people fleeing war-torn lands are met with hostility and shunned by governments as they simply try to survive. Or the film could more broadly just be about a particular time in early adolescence, when kids tend to leapfrog over one another on their way to young adulthood, sometimes leaving each other behind as they grow into their true selves and race down newly open paths.
Casarosa has explicitly said that the film is not a queer story, that it is all “platonic” and determinedly “pre-pubescent.” That suggests a limited understanding of gay growing up, particularly of when our feelings of affection and special closeness and difference can first develop. It would seem, as it so often does, that in Casarosa’s (and perhaps Disney’s) view, queerness must specifically involve sex to be queerness at all. And, of course, Pixar is never going to make a movie, ostensibly for kids, that even hints at sex.
Still, Luca is art offered up to be interpreted by myriad disparate viewers. Many of them may well see something specific in the arc of Luca and Alberto’s friendship, and in how they relate to the world around them. This at least nudges Disney closer to exploring the full breadth of reality. And Luca does, despite its vagueness, successfully pull off some of the usual Pixar tricks, provoking warm tears and weary sighs as one considers the familiar trajectories of life. The studio is masterful at teasing out those “It’s true, it really is like that” moments of manageably scaled profundity, all wrapped up in gleaming packages.
Aside from who it may or may not represent, the film is a nice introduction to summer in its intoxicating wash of blues and greens and oranges, the way it conjures up the heady momentum of youth, the thrilling rush of life’s pages turning. (To the likely dread of many worried parents the world over, the film is also a very effective advertisement for Vespa scooters. It should come as no surprise, of course, that Disney is ever adept at selling things.) Luca does well in that regard, though will perhaps be more memorable for what it might have been than for what it actually is.
The film arrives at a funny time in Disney’s tortured relationship with queer storytelling, just a few weeks after Cruella featured a sidelined character—second-hand clothing boutique owner Artie—proudly touted as queer, or non-binary, or something. That character, played tartly but briefly by John McCrea, is slightly less of a scrap than the embarrassingly ballyhooed “exclusively gay moment” in 2017’s Beauty and the Beast—but Artie still barely registered amid Cruella’s cynical clamor. Marvel’s Eternals, coming this fall, promises to feature an actual queer character (or characters) toward the foreground of the story, but until then we’ll have to settle for half-hearted innuendos.
Unless, of course, one considers the larger umbrella of Disney, which recently acquired 20th Century Fox and has folded much of that studio’s I.P. into its war machine. Last year, Disney punted Love, Victor—a series spinoff of the feature film Love, Simon, the first studio film about a gay kid coming out—from Disney+ to Hulu, declaring the young adult show a better fit for that more grownup streaming service.
The first season of Love, Victor very much felt like a show intended for Disney+ that somehow wound up alongside Handmaid’s Tale. Its affable, tween-friendly charm played awfully withholding and too squeaky for Hulu’s relative wilds. In season two, though, which premiered last week, the show’s creators—Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger—lean into the Hulu of it all, ramping up the swearing and the sex to perhaps better match a true teenage experience. It’s a lively, soapy season, remarkable in its frankness and yet still evasive in its sunny disposition.
Love, Victor season two admirably examines life post-coming out, as Victor (Michael Cimino) navigates his nascent relationship with barista Benji (George Sear) and tries to get his mother, Isabel (Ana Ortiz, queen of playing TV moms of gay kids), to fully accept his identity. Victor and Benji grapple with intra-gay conflicts just as much as they do with the wary considerations of the straight world. The season at its best is knowing and clever, risqué enough to keep young audiences engaged and intrigued, but not pushing the envelope off a cliff like HBO Max’s Genera+ion does. It’s a careful, perhaps corporately minded balancing act. I finished the season feeling glad that it existed, but still suspicious of how the series functions—and is valued—within Disney’s sprawling portfolio.
One could, I suppose, imagine a happy scenario in which Luca and Love, Victor serve as worthy waypoints in the growth of a young, queer viewer, in which conscientious, compassionate parents or guardians have a discussion post-Luca—and then, eventually, the kid arrives at Love, Victor on their own. Kids will, of course, find plenty of information and comfort and opportunities to feel seen outside of Disney’s ever-swelling bubble. But the world’s most totalizing content factory has begun, in small ways, to offer some guideposts of its own, lurching into the 21st century in its typically conservative way.
— An Oral History of A Different World, as Told by the Cast and Crew
— Home Truths: How HGTV, Magnolia, and Netflix Are Building a Massive Space
— Cruella de Vil Is Wicked—But Tallulah Bankhead Was Even Wilder
— Why Mare of Easttown Always Had to End That Way
— Cover Story: Issa Rae Says Goodbye to Insecure
— Kathryn Hahn All Along
— Why Kim’s Convenience Matters
— Court Dismisses Anti-Trans Assault Lawsuit Against Rosario Dawson
— From the Archive: When Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez Made Perfect Sense
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of Awards Insider.
