Maybe It's a Good Thing if "Luca" Isn't Queer

Reading the film as a story of two straight boys opens up a new world of emotionally intimate male friendship.

Every so often, you watch a movie that, somehow, manages to capture something of your own experience, that plunges you into the same maelstrom of emotions that you felt at some particularly meaningful phase in your life.

Luca, the newest release from Pixar, is just one of those stories for me. The film focuses on a pair of sea monster boys, Luca and Alberto, as they explore the meaning of friendship and family, belonging and home, and everything in between. What at first seems like a delightfully and entertainingly simple film, both in terms of animation and story, is in fact a story full of emotional richness, depth, and magic. 

Let’s begin with the animation. By this point, Pixar has a well-deserved reputation for its ability to give us colorful worlds bursting with vibrant color, emotional depth, and flights of fancy. That’s still very much in evidence here, but there’s also a glorious simplicity to the style here, reflecting the innocence of youth that is the film’s setting. You almost get the feeling that you’re watching a children’s book brought to life. 

Storywise, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative, a sort of retelling of The Little Mermaid without the romance. Luca and Alberto want to own a Vespa and go traveling the world together, and to that end they leave their ocean home and go to a nearby town, where they quickly get embroiled in a conflict between the local kids. Soon enough, Luca’s desire to go to school and learn more about the human world supersedes his desire to travel the world with Alberto, and though the two ultimately reconcile, he ultimately leaves his friend behind to embark on a new adventure. The stakes are clearly not that high in this film, but somehow Luca manages to immerse us in the story nevertheless, making us cheer for these two little sea monsters as they try to find a balance between their friendship and their increasingly-divergent desires. 

As it turns out, the film has also engendered some harsh criticism from members of the queer community who, having endured Disney’s relentless queer-baiting (most recently in the Marvel TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), saw the company once again putting their toe right on the line of depicting a same-sex romance in a major feature before backing off and retreating into the comfort of “no homo.” The film was greeted by quite an outpouring of well-articulated critiques, of which this piece, by Leigh Monson, is perhaps the paradigmatic example (though this article is also another good take). 

I will freely admit that, at first, I was also one of those people who hated the ending for what I perceived to be its bait-and-switch, though I hasten to add that my negative reaction to the film’s conclusion had more to do with my own projection of my personal biography onto the two characters and their bond than it did with the actual film itself. Like Luca, I too had a much more adventurous friend that I met while very young, with whom I still share a deep and abiding relationship. Unlike Luca, my feelings for him were decidedly romantic. Unsurprisingly, I began to inject my own frustrated yearnings into the film and, when it ended with Alberto and Luca separated--with the former becoming the protege of a fisherman and the latter going off to school with his (girl)friend--I felt deeply frustrated with what I felt to be the film’s betrayal of my expectations. How, I wondered, could Disney go to such lengths to set up this budding romance only to cheat us at the last minute? 

The more I’ve thought about it, however, the more I see this criticism of the film as somewhat misguided. To be sure, I understand where it’s coming from. Like everyone else, queer people yearn to see themselves--their stories, their experiences, their lives--brought to life on the screen, and this is especially important for the young. Though there are an increasing number of screen depictions of adolescent queer love and experience, that phenomenon is vanishingly rare in mainstream animation, which continues to evince a squeamishness about queer intimacy of any sort, no matter how relatively anodyne. 

And, to be sure, Luca’s narrative does, at first glance, seem to play with the idea that there might be something more than just friendship between Luca and Alberto. The fact that the story and the setting have so much in common with the 2017 coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name, and that the two characters have to hide their true identities as sea monsters so that they aren’t persecuted by those who dwell on land deeps the film’s queer overtones. It’s no surprise that queer viewers, so adept at deciphering texts that aren’t meant for them and finding meaning and queerness there anyway, would do so with a text that provides them so much raw material to work with.

For his part, the film’s director, Enrico Casarosa has gone to great pains to say that no, the film isn’t about young gay love but is, instead, about two young boys who become deep and abiding friends. When he was asked about the film’s superficial likeness to Call Me By Your Name, Casarosa laughed and said: ““I love Luca’s movies and he’s such a talent but it truly goes without saying that we really willfully went for a pre-pubescent story [...] This is all about platonic friendships.” Though his implication that pre-pubesent people can’t possibly be queer rankles, and while I’m hesitant to ascribe total authorial power to any director, I also think that, in some ways, it might actually be better if Luca is what it seems to me, i.e. a story about friendship rather than romantic love.

Let me explain.

It’s no secret that straight men in American culture have a lot of difficulty with their feelings, and this is especially true when it comes to their relationships with one another. They’re taught from a young age--by both the adults in their lives and by the culture that surrounds them and inundates them every day--that men don’t share emotional vulnerability with other men (for that matter, they really shouldn’t share that vulnerability with anyone, male or female). To be vulnerable, to share an emotional intimacy with another man, is to dangerously flirt with the specter of homosexuality which, even now, still carries with it the threat of emasculation.

Luca works against this trend from the moment that Luca and Alberto meet, and there’s an undeniable chemistry to the two leads; in some ways, it’s an ideal young male friendship. What’s more, each of them brings something unique to the relationship: Luca gives Alberto the sort of love and affection that he’s yearned for ever since his father left him, and Alberto teaches Luca how to embrace his adventurous side, voyaging beyond the safety of his undersea home. What’s more, they’re able to share their feelings openly with one another, and nowhere is this clearer than when Alberto, feeling spurned by Luca and jealous of the bond that he shares with the bookish (and yet also adventurous) Giulia, goes back to his island. Alberto tells Luca that his father’s abandonment makes him feel as if he’s not worthy of friends. It’s a gut-wrenching moment, even as its refreshing to see a young male character share such a deeply personal part of himself with another boy. Luca, for his part, knows that what he did--spurning Alberto and turning against him once his sea monster secret was revealed--and sets out to make it right by taking part in the local race. Alberto, in true Pixar movie fashion, also comes to the rescue, and their reunion, and the obvious feelings they have for one another, is one of the most touching moments in the entire movie.

Indeed, it’s precisely the emotional richness and intimacy of this same-sex friendship that makes Luca such a refreshing film. It’s a reminder that it’s okay, amazing, in fact, for boys to be friends with boys, to share their emotions and their feelings with one another in a way that doesn’t have to be romantic. Seen in this light, there is something liberating about Luca and its emphasis on platonic friendship, and I hope that it opens the door for more such representation. Doing so could, I think, go a long way toward dismantling toxic masculinity, allowing straight men the chance to express themselves in ways that they still struggle to do. 

All of that being said, I do harbor a hope that someday, in the not-too-distant future, either Disney or Pixar will release a film that actually gives us an explicitly queer narrative, one that tells young people of all ages that, regardless of who they fall in love with, they can find happiness and fulfillment. What’s more, I don’t want to discount the many queer readings that Luca provides. Part of the joy of film, after all, is the multiplicity of meanings that even one film contains.

Luca, like the best animated films of days gone by, has a little something for everyone.