Pixar announces Luca, a com­ing-of-age adven­ture set on the Ital­ian Riviera

Though virus-relat­ed delays have fore­stalled the release of Pixar​’s next big fea­ture Soul (you know, the one in which a comatose man’s anthro­po­mor­phized con­scious­ness must jour­ney through the after­life in search of truth and mean­ing – for kids!), the ani­ma­tion giant has already begun to break ground on their next project. Call Me by Your Name fans will be pleased, though the upcom­ing film will almost cer­tain­ly be less ripe with ado­les­cent sexuality.

But Pixar’s in-devel­op­ment Luca does indeed focus on one mag­ic sum­mer that two boys with a close bond spend cavort­ing around the Ital­ian Riv­iera. The dif­fer­ence in this case will be that one of the two boys also hap­pens to be a mys­ti­cal sea mon­ster tem­porar­i­ly assum­ing humanoid form to enjoy ​“gela­to, pas­ta, and end­less scoot­er rides,” in the words of the press release sent out this morning.

The com­ing-of-age sto­ry will be direct­ed by Enri­co Casarosa, long­time Pixar com­pa­ny man in his capac­i­ty as head of sto­ry on The Good Dinosaur and the cre­ator of the Ocsar-nom­i­nat­ed short La Luna, which played in a pack­age with 2012’s Brave. His artis­tic style hasn’t always adopt­ed the pol­ished house aes­thet­ic of Pixar, so it’s pos­si­ble that this fea­ture could have a visu­al pro­file fresh rel­a­tive to the studio’s canon.

The Ital­ian-born Casarosa will bring a piece of him­self to the film, as the release includes his state­ment: ​“This is a deeply per­son­al sto­ry for me, not only because it’s set on the Ital­ian Riv­iera where I grew up, but because at the core of this film is a cel­e­bra­tion of friend­ship. Child­hood friend­ships often set the course of who we want to become and it is those bonds that are at the heart of our sto­ry in Luca. So in addi­tion to the beau­ty and charm of the Ital­ian sea­side, our film will fea­ture an unfor­get­table sum­mer adven­ture that will fun­da­men­tal­ly change Luca.”

Not to start string­ing the red yarn on the cork board, but it wasn’t so long ago that a grow­ing boy had an ​“unfor­get­table sum­mer adven­ture” of sorts in the rolling greens of Italy. He def­i­nite­ly ​“came of age” while bask­ing in the glow by the water. That film was direct­ed by a man named Luca. This can­not pos­si­bly be coin­ci­dence. Is Disney/​Pixar try­ing to bite the robust SEO of Guadagnino’s recent queer romance? Is this the Mouse House’s effort to get in on the Tik­Tok mar­ket? We are not meant to have the answers to these questions.

Luca will come to the­aters in sum­mer 2021.