Is Luca Pixar’s First Gay Movie? Maybe
In a dazzling Italy some decades ago, two young men meet and experience a sweeping, happy-sad summer of self-realization together. That may sound roughly like the plot of Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, but it is also the story of the perhaps coincidentally named Luca, the latest bittersweet animated film from Disney and Pixar (on Disney+ June 18).
The film is about two kids, Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), who spend most of their time as gilled and finned creatures living under the sparklingly wine-dark Ligurian Sea. If they make their way onto land, they magically transform—in appearance, at least—into humans, free to interact with the landlubbers of a small fishing town populated with whimsical characters. Luca and Alberto share an intense, defining, and world-cracking-open bond, but must hide who they really are in the presence of judgmental, fearful others.
That outline holds an obvious potential for queer allegory, and indeed many Pixar fans tracking the film’s development quickly labeled Luca as the studio’s “gay movie”—a coming-out story to be placed on Pixar’s mantle alongside its meditations on grief, artistic expression, loneliness, Ayn Rand-ian objectivism, and parenting. Finally, Disney might actually venture into queer storytelling, a vast landscape of human experience that the studio has only meekly (and smugly) gestured toward in recent years.
