The name Luca is of English origin and means "bringer of light". It is the Italian variation of Luke or Lucas, meaning "man from Lucania".
Luca is not, ultimately, a love story. But it is a story that’s explicitly about otherness and self-discovery. The symbolism lends itself to interpretations of queerness, or as an allegory of assimilation.
SUMMARY OF LUCA (SPOILERS)
SEA CHANGE – Disney and Pixar’s “Luca” is a coming-of-age story about a sea monster who dreams of life beyond the surface. Since sea monsters look human when they’re dry, filmmakers at Pixar Animation Studios had to figure out how to showcase the incredible transformation from sea monster to human and back again in a fun and organic way. Given concept art and parameters driven by story, technical teams worked toward giving artists the flexibility to craft each transformation according to story needs—dictating details like the origin and speed of the transformation. The end result—developed through the collaboration of multiple teams, including art, tools and global technology, characters, effects, animation, simulation and lighting—is stylized, specific and seamless.
Summary begins here
Alberto and Luca run away to live in Portorosso after Luca’s loving but overprotective parents (Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan) attempt to send him to live with his deep-sea-dwelling Uncle Ugo (Sacha Baron Cohen). The kids have to pass in a community they expect would react with hostility if they were ever perceived as they wholly are. Alberto harbors a fantasy of perpetual escape in which he and Luca will use the prize money from the race to buy a Vespa and go on a never-ending road trip, while Luca, to Alberto’s dismay, starts to wonder if there’s a place where he can learn from and live among the humans — even though there are some, like town bully Ercole Visconti (Saverio Raimondo), who wear their intolerance proudly. “What happens when she sees you? When anyone sees you?” Alberto demands when Luca starts talking about following Giulia to school.
Luca is so intent on meaning something that it only ever halfway inhabits the delightfully colorful world it lays out. We never get a deeper understanding of the history between the sea monsters and the humans beyond some hints that there has been far more interaction than Luca was raised to believe. We never find out why Luca’s mother thinks the world is so dangerous; the narrative just needs her to be paranoid, and so she is. Alberto’s wayward dad remains an offscreen squiggle, a means of bolstering the surrogate-parent relationship Alberto begins to develop with Giulia’s father, a stern but kind fisherman whose bushy eyebrows are identical to his bushy mustache. Luca falls in love with astronomy after Giulia shows him the heavens through a telescope, but his burgeoning desire to study exists in contrast to nothing in particular, because there’s no sense of what future would have been available to him had he stayed underwater.
One of the side effects of children’s films becoming more progressive, aware, and careful is that they can lose some of the dimensionality they had before, when they were awash with subtext that didn’t always feel coherent or intended. Luca collects artifacts from the world above — much like a certain Disney mermaid with whom he shares a corporate umbrella — while never encountering anyone as defiantly memorable as Ursula, a villain based on the drag queen Divine. The film would rather evoke Guadagnino and Hayao Miyazaki, especially the latter’s Porco Rosso; the 1992 movie is an obvious touch point. But Luca doesn’t have the lived-in texture of a Studio Ghibli production, either, that palpable sense of a universe extending beyond each animated frame. What it does have are some groovy Italian pop songs and a setting as pleasant as a summer afternoon. The light glimmers off the surface of the ocean without any worry of going too deep.
