Ladies and Gentlemen, whether you like it or not, the Pixar Playlist
We’re almost caught
up with Pixar’s films, only 2 remain at time of writing, Turning Red and
Lightyear, the latter of which I have yet to watch. But before we get to them,
we’ve got an adventure on the Italian riviera, with sea monsters. It’s Luca.
Luca is largely the
brainchild of Enrico Casarosa, who loosely based the story on some of his own
experiences growing up in Italy. Writing the story is Mike Jones, who was also one
of the writers behind Soul and Jesse Andrews. Casarosa would direct, it’s his
first directors’ credit in film, but he’d been working as at artist at Pixar since
Cars, joining their senior creative team from Coco. He had also directed a
short called La Luna back in 2011.
There were some
roadblocks when it came to animation as COVID-19 lead to the shut-down of the
Pixar Campus, so all the animators were working from home. Though not before
some of the artists got some reference photos from the Italian Riviera to use
as a guide for the film’s locations.
Luca was released on Disney+ in early 2021, some of the Pixar Animators were annoyed that it was released for free whilst Raya and the Last Dragon, a Disney Animation Studios Film had a premium price for 3 months. It did have a release in a few locations, but made back a mere $49m on it’s… Wikipedia doesn’t state the budget but $200m is the standard for Pixar, whilst having to adapt to working from home may have caused additional expenditure.
