‘Luca’ is finally in theaters & fans still don’t get why it isn’t canonically gay

The 2021 animated film Luca is finally getting a theatrical release, more than two years after it started streaming on Disney+.

Pixar has been bringing its pandemic-era, streaming-only movies to multiplexes this year, with Soul lighting up screens in January and Turning Red following suit in February. Now it’s Luca’s turn—the film started playing in theaters March 22—and social media users are still mourning the gay romance that could have been Pixar canon.

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Set in a fictional Italian Riviera town, Luca is “is a coming-of-age story about one young boy experiencing an unforgettable summer filled with gelato, pasta, and endless scooter rides,” Disney and Pixar say in a synopsis of the film.

“Luca (Jacob Tremblay) shares these adventures with his newfound best friend, Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), but all the fun is at ri by a deeply-held secret: they are sea monsters from another world just below the water’s surface.”

The Luca trailer gave viewers Call Me By Your Name vibes—The New York Times’ review of the film was even subtitled “Calamari by Your Name”—and it seemed for a while like we might finally have a queer love story in the foreground of a Disney film.

#disney and #Pixar #Luca definitely looks like the story is a straight up metaphor for 2 gay boys in a world of #homophobia

Disney did so good with the short #out on #DisneyPlus, I wonder if they have the stones to make a movie with gay leads. #representationmatters pic.twitter.com/ddYzl8FC7P— SC King (He/Him) (@ZaneTheGenie) February 25, 2021

But then director Enrico Casarosa dampened those expectations, saying Luca and Alberto wouldn’t be romancing each other or anyone else.

“I was really keen to talk about a friendship before girlfriends and boyfriends come in to complicate things,” he told Polygon a couple months before the film’s Disney+ release. “This was about their friendship in that pre-puberty world. The type of friendship that is gonna push you into trouble. Push you into change, push you into finding yourself.”

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The next January, Casarosa told TheWrap that the Pixar team “talked about” a Luca–Alberto romance.

“I think the reason probably we didn’t talk about it as much — and, to a certain degree, we’re slightly surprised by the amount of people talking about romance — is that we were really focusing on friendship and so pre-romance,” he said.

“But it is a kind of love, right? There’s a lot of hugging and it’s physical and my experience as a straight man certainly wasn’t that. The things we did talk a lot about is, what is the metaphor here for being a sea monster, for being different? And some people seem to get mad that I’m not saying yes or no, but I feel like, well, this is a movie about being open to any difference.”

A couple months later, LGBTQ employees and their allies set Disney leadership a complaint alleging that Disney execs had actively censored “overtly gay affection” in feature-length Pixar films, as Variety reported at the time. Ex-employees told Variety that they’d been consistently thwarted in their efforts to include big and small LGBTQ moments in films over the years.

Two Variety sources also said that Luca filmmakers also considered making Giulia (Emma Berman) queer in the film but apparently had trouble doing so without introducing a girlfriend. “We very often came up against the question of, ‘How do we do this without giving them a love interest?’” one source recalled. “That comes up very often at Pixar.”

Finally, #Luberto shippers got validation this January when McKenna Harris, a story artist on Luca and the writer-director of the spinoff short Ciao Alberto, shared their “unsanctioned” artwork of the two characters kissing.

“I had a whole sequence in mind of Luca and Alberto reuniting for four summers in a row, culminating in a kiss,” Harris wrote on Instagram at the time.

As Luca splashes back into the pop-cultural conversation—and as the upcoming Inside Out 2 stokes hopes of less-subtextual queer romance—check out social media posts about Alberto and Luca’s “friendship” below.

Related:

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