The shortest Pixar movie since “Toy Story,” and one of the few that manages to keep its high-concept premise anchored to a simple human scale, Enrico Casarosa’s “Luca” is effectively the Disney+ equivalent of an aperol spritz on a late summer afternoon: sweet, effervescent, and all the more satisfying for its simplicity.
This is the kind of project that Pixar would have been able to produce at any time in its history if not for the pressure of grossing several billion dollars, winning a handful of Oscars, and waging a bloody civil war against the Minions for control of our kids’ imagination.
The “Beasts of the Southern Wild” composer summons his signature tremble and swell to set the stage for a movie that eschews the vast adventure of “Finding Nemo” for something more in-the-moment and driven by the capriciousness of youth.
Which isn’t to suggest that Luca Paguro — endearingly voiced by Jacob Tremblay — is a radical change of pace from the typical protagonist of an animated film, because he’s not.
Luca’s aquatic community is deeply under-realized — an errant mention of a neighboring family is what passes for world-building — but we’re made to understand that his kind have always lived in fear of the “land monsters” on the surface.
Whatever it takes for Luca to avoid being sent to live in the deep with his demented uncle, a translucent anglerfish who Sacha Baron Cohen turns into one of Pixar’s funniest characters in less than two minutes of screen time.
On the contrary, the greatest threat to Luca’s freedom is the voice in his head telling him to shrink back and stay in his tiny pocket of the ocean, and the film’s most violent moment is a betrayal among friends who need different things from each other.
Of course, Luca and Alberto’s damp adventure on dry land is bound together by their shared friendship with the fieriest girl in Portorosso, Giulia Marcovaldo sitcom B-plot, those are small prices to pay for the rare Pixar movie that doesn’t feel like it’s been thought to death.
Less flawless and plasticky than most CG kids fare, “Luca” gently affects the look of stop-motion puppetry whenever the characters are on land, and lends the salmon buildings and cobblestone streets of Portorosso such a visceral sense of place that you can almost feel the breeze coming off… the Mediterranean? The Adriatic? It’s unclear.
Not to get too “you could even say the town is like a character unto itself” about this, but the setting — so vividly plucked from Casarosa’s own childhood memories — is the secret ingredient of a movie that’s less concerned about what happens than it is about the magical possibility that anything might.