Starring: Jacob Tremblay, Jack Dylan Grazer, Emma Berman

Director: Enrico Casarosa

Pixar, out now (and on Disney+)

Sea monsters Luca and Alberto try to hide their secret…

Pixar’s latest offering is – as you would expect – gorgeous to look at, and perfectly sweet. It’s whether there’s anything more to it that is the real question – and it’s a question you can’t help asking because, hey, it’s Pixar, so you expect all that very expensive Californian therapy to be wrapped up in it somewhere – possibly in the subtext… possibly whacking you over the head with a self-improvement manual.

Sorry.  Do I sound like someone who has seen one too many Pixar movies?

So, Luca is a sea monster… well a sort of cute sea monster, living with his cute sea monster family off the coast of Italy in the 1960s. It has to be the 1960s because any later than that and the water would be so polluted and over-fished, all the cute sea monsters would be dead. Anyway, Luca hooks up with loner sea monster Alberto – who’s a little bit older – and it turns out they can just hop out of the water and become boys – intensely bound together into a loving friendship by their secret – but if they get wet, their sea monster identity is revealed, and the conservatively minded and macho locals will harpoon them. They meet a red-headed tomboy called Giulia whose Dad is the most macho fisherman in the village, hell bent on harpooning sea-monsters. Luca dreams of owning a Vespa motor scooter and so they enter a competition – a sort of triathlon with added spaghetti – but they can only win it if they ‘come out’ to the locals regarding their true, fishy identity. Soooo…. will they be harpooned or accepted?

Director Enrico Casarosa has insisted that there is no subtext to this film and that it most definitely isn’t the gay coming-of-age movie it that it so obviously appears to be.  Well, it’s Disney so I guess that was never going to happen, but that is a genuine shame, because while being gay isn’t the only kind of ‘other’ that you might want to tell a story about, it does smack of ‘the director doth protest too much’ which turns the possibility of a gay subtext into a ‘problem’ when it shouldn’t be. It’s a lovely film and a lot of people are enjoying it precisely because it does read as a kind of Call Me By Your Name for kids – with added Jules et Jim for good measure.

Indeed, if you strip out the gay subtext, frankly there’s not much to it.  The stakes aren’t very high, and the rules of the fantastical elements don’t quite hang together… it becomes an amorphous fable about identity. Just don’t mention the ‘g’ word! But, hey, as the old critical adage goes, ‘trust the tale not the teller’. People will read this movie howsoever they choose – and that’s a good thing. There’s nothing to be frightened of.  Luca won’t turn your children gay – or turn your gay children straight – just as it won’t turn them into sea monsters. And if some folk insist on stamping their feet and demanding that Luca and Alberto are ‘just good friends’, then that’s fine too… although… why?

Verdict: Luca may not be top drawer Pixar, but it’s well made, very enjoyable, as even an average Pixar is worth 90 minutes of anybody’s time. 7/10

Martin Jameson