LUCA'S DOLCE VITA - The Latest Pixar Cartoon Dives into Italy’s 1950s Culture

Making good cartoons is a very serious job, and Luca is one of them. Only, please let me start with a historic anecdote. Walt Disney’s first cartoons came out in 1921, but he waited until 1937 before he produced his first full-length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Before then, in the summer of 1935, during a European trip, he stopped in Rome, where he was welcome with a gala screening at Cinema Barberini. Disney asked for a cartoon to be inserted in the screening programme, called The Goddess of Spring. It featured a fairy fighting against Belzebub himself, with the help of a group of dwarves. At the end of the screening, Disney asked his Roman agent to walk around and collect feedback. The response was bad. Everybody was disappointed by the human figures which seemed out of place in a cartoon. Disney was not discouraged; it was an experiment related to his Snow White project. Indeed, if you watch that cartoon today, you will realise the huge quality leap which Disney made in just two years.

All this to confirm that to make good cartoons is a very serious job. Disney’s challenge was to move away from the animal world and get close to human reality. The same happened to Enrico Casarosa when directing Luca, the full-length cartoon which Pixar has just launched worldwide. Plus he had the added challenge of turning much-loved places and people into a cartoon.

Born in Genoa, Casarosa left Italy in his twenties to study in New York, settled there and eventually worked for Pixar. In 2011 his La Luna received an Academy Award nomination for best animated short film. It did not win, but, eleven years later, Casarosa has managed to up his game and bring his dream to the silver screen: an animated full-length film about the places and people he knew and loved as a child.

The story takes a few minutes to take off. The first scenes, in which we see Luca’s daily life as a little salamander-like monster at the bottom of the sea, are not particularly original. But when Luca emerges on the shore and takes human shape, everything comes together. We are in the Italian Riviera, the Cinque Terre area, east of Genoa, and the fishing village of Monterosso is the model for the film. But it is not just the surroundings which come to life, it is also the story. Luca becomes a tale of coming-of-age delicately balanced between sheer fun and the odd sad swings which, as we all know, are part and parcel of being a teenager. The film also turns into a celebration of the Italy of the late 1950s, when thanks to the so-called “economic miracle” Italians entered world stage as an industrialised nation, whose finely-designed products and hedonistic lifestyle became a global brand. In the film this is condensed into the ultimate object of Luca’s desire: a Vespa scooter. Casarosa’s decision to use a semi-photographic image of the scooter gives a clear sense of the close relationship he intended to keep between the historic reality of those years and Luca’s cartoon narrative.

The up and downs of Luca’s attempts to become a “normal” child, win the village race, buy himself a Vespa and eventually go to school, take us on a whirlwind tour of every corner, alley and – a key place in Italian life - the village central square. It is difficult not to think that, had this story been developed by non-natives, it would have been weighed down by the recurrent stereotypes about Italy and Italians. Instead, those very stereotypes – the worrying mamma first of all – are treated with a delicate touch which allows us to see the humanity of each individual character and, at the same time, enjoy the film as a benevolent caricature of an Italy gone-by. A couple of homages to literature reveal the literary roots of this realistic/fantastic narrative: from Collodi’s Pinocchio to the great novelist who produced his trilogy of Our Ancerstors right in the 1950s: not by chance the village square is called “Piazza Calvino”, and the father of Luca’s beloved friend, Giulia, is called Marcovaldo (the title of another Calvino book of those years). It almost goes without saying that the music soundtrack presents us with a list of the Italian pop Greatest Hits from those years.

However, beyond industrial design, Italy’s major cultural export in those years was not literature nor books. It was films, and cinema is indeed present with even more homages and references. The most defining one concerns Fellini’s films. Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini’s cinematic alter-ego par excellence appears twice in Luca: first in a portrait cut-out cherished by Alberto, and then inside a television screen (a tv set in a corner showing a scene from Big Deal on Madonna Street, of 1958). But, more importantly, underneath the whole story one feels the presence of an inspiring model: it is Fellini’s early masterpiece I vitelloni (1953). This was Fellini’s coming-of-age story, reproducing another seaside resort, his Rimini on the Adriatic coast. Luca’s friendship with fellow-monster Alberto is a tale-tell sign. Alberto’s tragicomic features (and name!) are a clear reminder of Moraldo’s best friend, Alberto, in I vitelloni, famously played by Alberto Sordi.

Both “Alberto” accompany the protagonist through their joys and troubles, until Luca/Moraldo decides to leave their hometown and face the world. The same, exact setting, the deserted railway station, the train leaving slowly, a boy running after the train are a homage which gives us a measure of the ambitious aims behind this full-length cartoon. Plus, Luca and Alberto are no 1950s “vitelloni”. On this front, Casarosa has rightly brought the story into the 21th century: the transformation from sea monsters to young humans is a tale of suffered emancipation, of capacity to affirm one’s diversity against the weight of dull conformism. Even better: it is not a one-way journey. Luca accepts the fluidity of his ego and he is happily sea-monster and child at the same time.

A final note: the homages are not entirely Italian. The comic, big cat in the film looks like a character straight out of a film by the Mecca of Japanese animation, Studio Ghibli, whose cartoons, it must be said, were all over Italian tv screens when Casarosa was a child. The overall result is a most entertaining film, one of those Pixar-typical films – from Toy Story (1995) to Cars (2006) or Coco (2017) – which can be enjoyed by children as much as by adults. The latter can happily grin after the many clever references and jokes, whist pretending not to be emotionally engrossed in Luca’s and his friends’ journey to adulthood.