This entry goes right to the source with exclusive comments from Luca writer-director Enrico Casarosa on the movies and filmmakers that served as inspiration for the Pixar animated feature.
Pixar animators have always paid tribute to other movies in their work, and the studio’s twenty-fourth feature, Luca, is no exception.
Many of those eggs were hatched by Luca co-writer and director Enrico Casarosa because they make sense to be there — the animated feature is set on the coast of Italy in the late 1950s , and most of the real films referenced are from that era and relevant to either Italy or the sea.
Casarosa has briefly and broadly mentioned some of his influences in other interviews while promoting Luca, but I reached out to the filmmaker for deeper insight into his creative process as it relates to these works that consciously sparked ideas for the story and the style of the movie.
If that doesn’t sound enough like it shares elements with Luca, one of the boys is obsessed with Italy and pretends to be someone he isn’t in order to fit in, and the movie climaxes with a bicycle race where the protagonists are the underdogs.
And then we often look at movies and we try to analyze them, and then I looked up the history of it, and it was so interesting that the screenwriter had put two different scripts into one.
We had a lot of meat on the fire in the beginning and were trying to figure out, well, is the story more about these two worlds coming together and these two factions of sea folks and humans having to deal with each other, or is it more about the friendship.
For a while, there was a kid adventure, like some movies have them build a house, some movies have a fort of sorts, or there’s some sort of contest.
Like ‘Breaking Away’ did, and how can we do it in our way? That’s when you start brainstorming and adding, well, maybe we should make something with the water.
Let’s find some really fun way to — how do we make it Italian? Which is actually kind of a paradox because in Italy, eating contests where you eat a lot of food and kind of get sick is not really culturally right.
I think what I got out of ‘Breaking Away’ is that I loved that they were able to do a coming-of-age story with a friendship story with a whole story about being outsiders with the cool kids.
Maybe Future Boy Conan, since that’s at the beginning of Miyazaki’s career as a director, but it’s a TV series, and I won’t cheat by going with the 1979 theatrical film release compiled from episodes of the anime because Miyazaki disapproved of that version and took his name off it.
I’ll admit I was further torn about having this entry be so broad in scope because Luca definitely seems to align more with the cuter, simpler films of Miyazaki, such as My Neighbor Totoro — though ironically the latter was apparently never on Casarosa’s mind while making his movie.
I feel when you talk about ‘Totoro,’ what I got out of Miyazaki was less a specific movie that I could tell you.
How do we stay a little bit simpler in the world of kids? Because that is, for example, when I think of ‘Totoro,’ that’s what I love about that movie, it is beautifully of that world, and the logic of it stays within the kid logic.
I love that, and that is certainly something I got in my DNA from his movies that are so beautiful that way.
It’s been so wonderful to get a lot of people from my area in Italy to be like, “Oh my gosh, you got the sound of the pebbles on the wave going down back into the sea.” Because it’s not a sandy beach.
You say, oh, it could be a bit like ‘Stand By Me,’ but then when you’re on the way, every once in a while you say, oh no, you can’t do that because that’s too close to the movie.
There’s this old TV series from Miyazaki where the protagonist had this little tank top, and Alberto has a pretty similar tank top that’s a little homage to that.
We were looking at woodblock prints of boats and the reflections in the water, and we realized that beautiful old woodblock prints were simplifying the reflection of the water like Ghibi movies do.