Luca - Is It Good or Nah? (Pixar Review)

you know sometimes i feel like the company that's done the most damage to pixar's reputation over the years is pixar themselves i mean they front loaded their output with so many genre-defining emotional rollercoaster masterpieces that it made their sudden slip into occasional mediocrity and awfulness so much more egregious than it would have been if they had just been a studio with a mixed output of quality from the start like dreamworks and while that's true to an extent for me personally a bad movie is a bad movie regardless of the name of the studio attached to it a lot of people tell me that i'm too hard on films like brave or the good dinosaur or onward because they're only bad compared to the rest of pixar's lineup they're actually perfectly fine movies that just have to struggle under the weight of expectations associated with the pixar brand to that i say no they're bad movies at least in my opinion i don't care if they came from pixar or illumination i still wouldn't like them for reasons i've gone over plenty of times before now i wanted to bring this up before talking about luca because this movie is another one that doesn't seem to be living up to the pixar standard on paper pixar movies are supposed to make you cry or feel or think they're supposed to be child-friendly whimsical adventures while also being deep emotionally moving experiences that get better as you get older luca is not that it's not a wally or a toy story or a coco or a soul it really just is a movie about two sea monster bros chilling in an italy town six feet apart cause they're not gay the conflict of the movie is they want to win a race to get money to buy a vespa while also hiding the fact that they're sea monsters there's no grand quest there's no reflections on the nature of life or emotion or anything like that it really is one of the simplest movies pixar has ever made and it doesn't seem to jive with most of the studio's best films and you know what this is the most fun i've had with a pixar movie in 11 years it's so refreshing to get something this simple and inherently likable from this studio while also not being boring or aimless plus the fact that the story is as basic and unambitious as it is means that most of the movie honestly flows better than something like coco or soul we love those movies for their ideas and their emotional moments but the events that happen to get us to those emotional moments are kind of fetch questy and don't flow amazingly well like in coco why do we need to go to all these places where ernesto might be only to find out oh no he's at this other place well it's because the movie needs to space out its emotional beats so here's a filler quest to try and find him and in seoul that barbershop scene is really compelling and great how did we get to this point oh yeah joe as a cat tried to cut some hair that looked perfectly fine and also was covered by a hat so it didn't even need to be cut and inside out is just like contrivance city i don't even need to get into that one's order of events modern pixar movies are filled with contrivances and roadblocks that you just kind of drudge through in order to get to the really strong emotional stuff now these contrivances never bothered me that much i mean obviously i love these films but they do prevent the story from flowing as well as they did in the early 2000s pixar movies luca by contrast doesn't have this problem for the majority of its run time because the main character's goals are so simple the events they go through in order to achieve these goals flow very naturally and don't feel contrived in the slightest until the third act a little bit but we'll get to that later for now i just want to say that the characters in this are really charming and likable the main character luka reminded me a lot of arlo from the good dinosaur if he was written by competent people and i really loved the bond he formed with alberto also jack dylan grazer is very talented in everything he's in and he really sold me in the emotional moments this character has i like this quirky girl they meet and the outcast friendship they all form together her father is the peak of character design much like the cloudy with a chance of meatballs dad that came before him there's a sasha baron cohen cameo for like one minute that threw me off guard and was pretty enjoyable oh and the villain in this is so refreshing modern disney and pixar movies either want to have a twist villain some sort of dark force with no personality or no real villain at all which is why it's so great just to get this rival villain in the same vein as chick hicks or skinner hell look at his upper lips they just straight up look exactly like skinner's upper lips truly iconic i was very entertained by this character aside from the characters i like how simple the rules of this universe are sea monsters look like human on land but then they turn back into sea monsters when they are wet they heard fish who are kinda like sheep it's not horribly confusing and absurd like it is in the good dinosaur where some of the dinosaurs are like dogs and some aren't oh wait i might be thinking of dinosaur the disney movie man disney cgi dinosaur movies all my homies hate disney cgi dinosaur movies point is the rules of this movie are very clear and they don't break them at all really i also never screamed are these humans blind at the screen like i did in toy story 4 i think these sea monsters covered their tracks pretty well and it was all believable and this movie has pasta in it so much pasta that i got really hungry halfway through and just ordered some it was delicious i give this movie bonus points for its pasta this is how i judge movies now please respect my decision during this difficult time okay so wow this movie sounds very fun and charming and enjoyable and kind of the best thing pixar has made in over a decade right well i'm not really sure because compared to something like coco that just knocks everything out of the park in its final act this one kinda falters a bit in that part i guess we'll get into spoilers here skip to this time frame to avoid so as the movie goes on alberto suddenly gets jealous that luca's spending so much time with the girl he's justifiably afraid of losing him to the heteros but i think he acts like way too much of an during this part of the movie it becomes clear why he doesn't want to lose luca but his actions at this part of the movie and what he says to him just kind of paint him is really unlikable there's this moment where luka pretends he doesn't know alberto is a sea monster and it's supposed to be this huge betrayal but like alberto was being a dick he kind of deserves this oh by the way props to this movie for not doing a liar reveal thing with them being sea monsters the girl doesn't act betrayed at all she just wants them to leave so they'll be safe from the rest of the town i should really look up what her name is since i've been talking about her a lot julia okay cool yeah so jello and luca then decide to do the race by themselves which i don't know kind of feels like a weird choice i feel like luca and alberto should have reconciled and then resolved to do the race together then convinced jorno that they could remain a three-person team i feel like emotionally i would have clicked more with their reconciliation and it would have felt better knowing that they were all working as a team to beat italian skinner the story could remain the same from then on alberto could still come and bring luke an umbrella when it starts raining and then it would make more sense when they both win the trophy at the end considering as is alberto technically wasn't even entered in the race so luca's really the only winner why couldn't it have just been all three of them are the winners i i just don't get it overall this race has just got a lot of stuff happening in all sorts of different directions and it's not the best climax ever plus i feel like this town accepts these sea monsters a little too quickly considering how much anti-sea monster imagery there is here i don't mind the dad accepting them but this is kind of like that every villain at the end of shrek iii decides not to be evil thing again just give them a little time to get used to the idea i don't know but then again it didn't bother me too much because it's not like this whole sea monster prejudice thing is really the focus the focus is just on these really strong friendships between these really likable and fun characters this movie is very comparable to a slice of life ghibli movie that that studio would make in between their more ambitious projects and that's the kind of film that pixar has never really had the opportunity to make they've only ever been expected to deliver paradigm-shifting emotionally powerful masterpieces anything that isn't one of those can and has been construed as a failure by a ton of people but it's time to break out of that mindset a pixar movie can simply be a really fun time they don't have to change the world luca is just that a movie that doesn't try to be anything it's not and winds up all the better for it it's hard to say if i like it better than coco or seoul because it is a very different type of movie trying to accomplish very different goals but i'm going to give it the same score i gave those movies an 8 out of 10. i had a blast with this movie and i highly recommend checking it out even if it's not the best thing that aired on disney plus on friday june 18th 2021 watch the bad batch you guys i'm begging you buena notte zona de tres tati god that was awful italian i can already tell i don't even need the comments to tell me [Applause] you

Channel: Schaffrillas Productions

Views: 1,621,826

Rating: 4.9228311 out of 5

Keywords: Schaffrillas Productions, Pixar, Luca, Review, Disney, Disney Plus

Id: xOKqHFyO0cw

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021