Last year, Disney punted Love, Victor-a series spinoff of the feature film Love, Simon, the first studio film about a gay kid coming out-from Disney+ to Hulu, declaring the young adult show a better fit for that more grownup streaming service.
Unless, of course, one considers the larger umbrella of Disney, which recently acquired 20th Century Fox and has folded much of that studio’s I.P. Marvel’s Eternals, coming this fall, promises to feature an actual queer character (or characters) toward the foreground of the story, but until then we’ll have to settle for half-hearted innuendos. That character, played tartly but briefly by John McCrea, is slightly less of a scrap than the embarrassingly ballyhooed “exclusively gay moment” in 2017’s Beauty and the Beast-but Artie still barely registered amid Cruella’s cynical clamor. The film arrives at a funny time in Disney’s tortured relationship with queer storytelling, just a few weeks after Cruella featured a sidelined character-second-hand clothing boutique owner Artie-proudly touted as queer, or non-binary, or something. It should come as no surprise, of course, that Disney is ever adept at selling things.) Luca does well in that regard, though will perhaps be more memorable for what it might have been than for what it actually is. (To the likely dread of many worried parents the world over, the film is also a very effective advertisement for Vespa scooters. Or the film could more broadly just be about a particular time in early adolescence, when kids tend to leapfrog over one another on their way to young adulthood, sometimes leaving each other behind as they grow into their true selves and race down newly open paths.Īside from who it may or may not represent, the film is a nice introduction to summer in its intoxicating wash of blues and greens and oranges, the way it conjures up the heady momentum of youth, the thrilling rush of life’s pages turning. The boys’ washing ashore brings to mind the recent immigration and refugee crisis gripping Europe, as people fleeing war-torn lands are met with hostility and shunned by governments as they simply try to survive. There is enough there to graft a queer reading onto-Luca’s doting parents (voiced by Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan) are scared about how Luca’s identity may be greeted by those who don’t understand him, for instance-but the film could just as easily be seen as an allegory for other sorts of difference. The goofiness of Luca and Alberto learning to ride bicycles and eat pasta, while trying to avoid water, is the film’s central concern any deeper probing of what the film is actually about will have to be done by each individual audience member. It’s mostly the story of a kids’ triathlon competition held in the quaint village of Portorosso, where Luca and Alberto meet a local girl, Giulia, who is also a black-sheep outlier in her staid, conservative town. The film is lovely and funny, but it operates on a more minor key than some of Pixar’s true classics. Finally, Disney might actually venture into queer storytelling, a vast landscape of human experience that the studio has only meekly (and smugly) gestured toward in recent years. That outline holds an obvious potential for queer allegory, and indeed many Pixar fans tracking the film’s development quickly labeled Luca as the studio’s “gay movie”-a coming-out story to be placed on Pixar’s mantle alongside its meditations on grief, artistic expression, loneliness, Ayn Rand-ian objectivism, and parenting. Luca and Alberto share an intense, defining, and world-cracking-open bond, but must hide who they really are in the presence of judgmental, fearful others.
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If they make their way onto land, they magically transform-in appearance, at least-into humans, free to interact with the landlubbers of a small fishing town populated with whimsical characters.
The film is about two kids, Luca ( Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto ( Jack Dylan Grazer), who spend most of their time as gilled and finned creatures living under the sparklingly wine-dark Ligurian Sea. That may sound roughly like the plot of Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, but it is also the story of the perhaps coincidentally named Luca, the latest bittersweet animated film from Disney and Pixar (on Disney+ June 18).
In a dazzling Italy some decades ago, two young men meet and experience a sweeping, happy-sad summer of self-realization together.