Pixar’s Luca opens on the Italian Riviera in the 1950s, where a timid sea monster boy herds goatfish and is told never to go near the surface. He goes anyway. That small act of disobedience sets off a summer that director Enrico Casarosa builds into something warmer and stranger than the studio’s recent output — a film about passing as human, made by people who clearly remember what it felt like to be a kid pretending to be someone else.
The film runs 95 minutes. It is an animated fantasy comedy with family, drama and comedy in its bones, and it carries the tagline “Prepare for an unforgettable trip.” The trip is worth taking. It is not Pixar’s best, and it does not pretend to be. It is a small story told with unusual care.
Trailer, via Pixar.
Luca Paguro and the boy in the lighthouse
Luca Paguro, voiced by Jacob Tremblay, lives off the coast of Portorosso. He meets Alberto Scorfano, voiced by Jack Dylan Grazer, a fellow sea monster kid living alone in an abandoned lighthouse. Alberto shows him the trick that drives the whole movie: sea monsters turn human when they are dry. Wet them, and the scales come back.
The boys become friends fast. They want a Vespa and they want to travel the world. Luca starts sneaking out against his parents’ orders — they fear humans will hunt him — and when they find out, they decide to send him to the deep with his uncle Ugo. Luca runs away instead and hides in Portorosso with Alberto.
This is the engine of the film, and Casarosa keeps it simple. Two kids, one secret, one town that would kill them if it knew. The stakes are never abstract.
Ercole Visconti and the Portorosso Cup
The boys run into Ercole Visconti, voiced by Saverio Raimondo, the local bully and a five-time champion of the Portorosso Cup. The Cup is a triathlon: swimming, pasta-eating, biking. When Ercole tries to soak Luca in a fountain, Giulia Marcovaldo, voiced by Emma Berman, stops him.
Giulia is an outsider and a misfit. The boys team up with her to win the prize money for the Vespa. She invites them to stay at her house and introduces her fisherman father, Massimo, voiced by Marco Barricelli, a man with a booming voice and a prejudice against sea monsters.
Massimo does not know he is housing two of the things he hates. Luca does not know how to tell him.
The secret that breaks the friendship
Giulia and Luca bond over a love of learning, and Alberto hates it. When Luca shows interest in attending school, Alberto deliberately reveals his own sea monster form to Giulia to stop him. She is frightened. Luca, unwilling to give himself up, fakes shock at the transformation. Alberto flees, betrayed, as Ercole’s gang arrives to hunt him.
Giulia finds out Luca is a sea monster too and sends him away for his own safety. Luca goes to Alberto’s hiding place to reconcile.
Alberto gives himself away on purpose. Luca lets him.
“Prepare for an unforgettable trip.”
Voices that carry the weight
Tremblay voices the title character, and Casarosa called working with him “such a pleasure.” The director added: “I love how earnest and innocent he is naturally. And he’s playful and he’s not afraid to try stuff so it was so much fun to improvise with him.” Tremblay said Luca “really wants to explore the world and I can really relate to that.”
Grazer brings what Casarosa described as “a natural confidence and vulnerability” to Alberto, “a free-spirited teen sea monster with unbridled enthusiasm for the human world.”
Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan play Daniela and Lorenzo Paguro, and they got to improvise. Casarosa said of Rudolph’s Daniela: “She’s a stern mother. She’s a difficult and very controlling mother, but there’s this other warmth to her that balances it.” The supporting cast is stacked with actual Italian actors — Raimondo as Ercole, Barricelli as Massimo, Lorenzo Crisci as Guido, Marina Massironi as Signora Marsigliese, Gino La Monica as the old fisherman Tomasso. That choice matters. The accents are not a joke.
| Chapter | Focus | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| Act one | Luca meets Alberto at the lighthouse | First third of 95 minutes |
| Act two | Portorosso, Giulia, the Cup | Middle of 95 minutes |
| Act three | The reveal and the race | Final third of 95 minutes |
What the film is actually about
The sea monsters are a metaphor for feeling different. That is Casarosa’s own framing, and the film does not bury it. Luca can pass. Alberto cannot always control it. The town of Portorosso has a festival, a bully, a champion and a rule about who belongs.
Casarosa drew on his childhood in Genoa. Pixar sent artists to the Italian Riviera to research the culture and the environment for Portorosso. The sea monsters came loosely from old Italian regional myths. The design and animation were inspired by hand-drawn and stop-motion work and by Hayao Miyazaki’s style. Casarosa said the result “pays homage to Federico Fellini and other classic Italian filmmakers, with a dash of Miyazaki in the mix too.”
Development took five years. Production was done remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dan Romer composed the score. None of that is visible on screen, which is the point.
Where it lands
Luca is a 95-minute film that does not try to be a franchise starter. It has no villain worth fearing, no world-ending stakes, no third-act twist that reorders everything. Ercole is a bully with a trophy case, not a threat to the universe.
What it has instead is a clean metaphor and the discipline not to explain it twice. The Vespa is a dream the boys chase through the triathlon, and the film never lets the chase turn into filler.
The weakness is that the middle sags. The triathlon training, the pasta-eating, the town festival — these are charming, and they are also the parts where the film coasts. Casarosa has a light touch, and sometimes the touch is too light.
Still, the ending works. Luca and Alberto both learn something about being seen, and the movie does not pretend the lesson is free.
Luca is not the studio’s most ambitious work. It is a story about two boys who spend the whole movie afraid of being seen, and it refuses to inflate itself. That restraint is the right call.
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