'Luca', Pixar's cute fable about immigration

The new Pixar film takes place in an imaginary town on the Italian Riviera where two strange children arrive who want to indulge in the joys of summer,

rides

and ice cream. Two children who are actually mutant beings, two tadpoles of a sea monster that out of the water take the form of any child. Little Luca and Alberto, tired of their precarious life at the bottom of the sea, yearn for a better future on the surface so that they can discover the pleasures of humans. But danger lies in wait for them, because while they want to change their environment to enjoy a better life and those consumer objects that humans throw away all the time, for people they are only horrible and threatening creatures.

It takes time to start, but when it does it provides a ride as agile and charming as the Vespa that its main characters dream of.

A walk whose final change of gear ends up mutating a friendship story into a fable about the difference that, between references and winks to the cinema and Italian culture, hides a plea in favor of immigration, to those "strangers" who come to the coast from the sea.

More information

• 'Luca': Pixar travels to the happiest summer of childhood

• Thanks to life (and to Pixar)

Luca is

right in almost everything and is supported by a chorus of fabulous secondary characters: the father of the girl Giulia and his great mustachioed cat, the parents and the grandmother of Luca or the pimp of the town.

The first film directed by Enrico Casarosa, an Italian emigrant to the United States who already wrote and directed the short film

, mixes the cheerful ocher and blue of the architecture and the sea of ​​the Riviera with topics well brought from the summer Italy of the years. fifty and sixty.

Even pasta, that food kidnapped in Disney's popular imagination by the timid kiss of

, leaves its old doggy romanticism behind to talk about two desperate children who gobble it up with all four hands.

Luca

Direction: Enrico Casarosa.

Genre: animation, United States, 2021.

Duration: 95 minutes.