Luca 4K 2021 Ultra HD 2160p

The plot will focus on two friends who meet on the Italian Riviera. Everything would be fine, but in fact they are sea creatures, in which they transform under the influence of water. They have fun, but at the same time, they try to keep their secret from others.

Luca 4K Review
Luca is a small sea monster who lives off the Italian coast with his family. Representatives of his biological species know how to transform into people when they get on land, but only the brave do this: most creatures are afraid of man - so Luka's mother strictly forbids him to even get close to everything human. But one day he naturally breaks this rule. It's all the fault of the violent teenager-monster Alberto, who introduces the hero to the joys of the human world: air, stars and, last but not least, the Vespa moped.

The two-wheeled marvel of Italian mechanical engineering becomes the obsession of two guys. And when Luca's parents, having found out about his travels on land, decide to send him deep into the ocean to an unpleasant angler uncle, he runs away from home and, together with Alberto, goes to the most terrible place for a sea monster - the coastal town of Porto Rosso, whose inhabitants are many centuries hunted for their species (and continue to this day). There they meet a strange girl, Julia, and learn about the city's triathlon competition, in which they pay a small amount, but enough to buy an old Vespa. Friends, naturally, decide to try their hand.

From the outside, the plot of "Luka" may seem overloaded - there is a competition, and a conflict with parents, and a story with sea monsters, and this is not to mention subplots with Alberto and an absent father, a confrontation with a local impudent overgrown teenager, a multiple triathlon winner, as well as the personal drama of Julia's stern parent, who is also the main hunter of water monsters in the area. But that is only an appearance. In fact, with all the details and script offshoots, Luka is a very straightforward movie about growing up and identifying, about how important it is to accept someone other than you, and even more importantly, yourself. Such a "Monsters Corporation", which replaced the fantastic interiors with the sunny landscapes of the Italian Riviera.

But simplicity is not a vice at all. Pixar doesn't like confusing metaphors at all, everything seems to be on the surface, but every time it hits as hard as other "deep" festival dramas have never dreamed of. "Luka", like its titular protagonist, avoids depths and is not going to live in the hopeless darkness of the philosophical ocean. On the contrary, he kind of reveals his dramatic structure to the viewer, clearly showing that even a thousand times overwritten monomyths can be made to work. You will probably easily guess how the picture will end, at what point friends will quarrel, at what point they will reconcile, when the people and monsters around them can finally accept their otherness. But even with a full understanding of the mechanism of the local drama, it is difficult not to fall under its tear-blowing, piercing effect.

This is the great secret of Pixar - technological prophets and dramaturgic geniuses who understand the script craft so well that one would like to disassemble even far from their best pictures for examples in professional textbooks. Each line will surely find a spectacular end, any gag from the beginning can suddenly return at the end, the psychological stages that the heroes need to go through, even if they stick out from the narrative structure like a bare wire, but are read by any viewer at the subconscious level - precisely because we are like the plots were seen more than once. Their cartoons may not be the standards of "smart" cinema, but they show what effects can be achieved by mastering classic plot structures, perfectly matched intonations, angles, and graceful movements of a 3D brush.

Luca may be a fairly average film by studio standards, but it still remains a brilliant debut for director Enrico Casaros and one of the best cartoons of the year. Yes, it is sometimes too schematic, events in it often happen at the will of the script, and not on the basis of internal logic (especially in this regard, the touching finale stands out). In a number of stories about the self-knowledge of a not-quite-human through participation in a competition taking place in Italy, he loses on all fronts to Miyazakov's Porco Rosso (and this is not some random parallel, here even the city where the action takes place is called Porto Rosso). But for once, Pixar makes a really "children's" movie - and this time it's not even about death. Sweet, warm, sunny, insert any other nice epithet. Such, after which you do not want to lock yourself at home and ponder the inevitability of your own death and why you exist in the world at all. Believe it or not, the absence of an easily readable existential crisis in a children's cartoon feels like an almost innovative creative solution.