If you look closely, you’ll catch a glimpse of Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina. The visual craft is lovely and subtle - the orange glow of Mediterranean sunsets the narrow streets and craggy escarpments the evocations of Italy and Italian movies. But also not a pandering, obnoxious bit of throwaway family entertainment. Instead of philosophical and cinematic ambition, there is a diverting, somewhat familiar story about friendship, loyalty and competition set against a picturesque animated backdrop. Unlike some other recent Pixar features, this one aims to be charming rather than mind-blowing. It’s a friendly bauble of a film, but it can’t help but make you wonder if Pixar is losing its golden touch.“Luca” was directed by Enrico Casarosa, whose warm, whimsical aesthetic also infused “La Luna” (2012), his Oscar-nominated short. Will the town accept them? “Luca” resolves that question in as winsomely simple a fashion as it does everything else. Someone at the studio needed to send a memo saying that this isn’t quite a plot - it’s a bunch of incidents killing time.Īt last, the film arrives at the Portorosso Cup and has some fun with it, as Luca attempts to do the swimming portion of the triathlon in an ancient diver’s suit, only to learn, by the time they’re on bikes, that it has begun to rain, which will turn these sea monsters right back to their natural selves. The rascally Vespa owner Urkule stands around the town square taunting and kvetching. And Luca’s parents, distressed at his disappearance, show up in Portorosso in their own human guise, dropping water balloons on kids to see if one of them will turn back into their son. Luca learns that what he thought were “fish” in the night sky are actually stars. The two boys help Massimo with his fishing, because they know just where the fish are. “Luca” is the first feature directed by Enrico Casarosa, who made the celebrated 2011 Pixar short “La Luna,” and while his images have a perky bravura (especially in a fantasy sequence spun out of the glories of the Vespa), the script, by Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones, is pretty thin stuff. And that pasta scene aside, they don’t seem to have much trouble adjusting to acting like humans. But only for a few seconds they snap right back. Luca and Alberto team up with the feisty, flame-haired Giuilia (Emma Berman), who can get them into the race, and they spend some time at her house, quaking under the mostly wordless gaze of her hulking, brooding, one-armed knife-happy fisherman father, Massimo (Marco Barricelli), who lives in mortal fear of sea monsters and makes the tastiest looking pesto pasta, which our two heroes literally stuff their faces with, since they have no idea how to use a fork.Įvery so often, an overhead leak or a thrown glass of water will land on their skin and reveal their psychedelically hued sea-monster selves. “Luca” is a bit colorless until the two boys arrive in the sloping fishing village of Portorosso, with its crooked pastel buildings and winding streets, its sun-dappled town square dotted with a trattoria and a pescheria, its poster of “La Strada.” So quaint! So picturesque! So Fellini meets De Sica meets your trusty postwar travel agent! Once there, they discover there’s going to be a local competition, the annual Portorosso Cup triathlon (swimming, pasta eating, bike riding), the winner of which will receive a prize of enough money to buy a Vespa. Alberto is alone except for all the junk he collects, but with his reckless high spirits he’s got a dream: He’ll do anything to own a Vespa! That’s right, the fabled Italian motor scooter that was introduced in 1946. He meets the teenage Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), who’s like the sea-monster version of a Jonas brother, and who’s been on land for a while, living in an abandoned stone castle column as a real boy. Crawling up on a rocky beach, he becomes a curly-haired, big-eyed kid who looks Italian but still sounds, in the performance of Jacob Tremblay (from “Wonder”), like a wide-eyed American everykid. Luca is desperate to go ashore, despite the dire warnings of his parents, the brassy Daniela (Maya Rudolph) and lumpish Lorenzo (Jim Gaffigan).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |