The first full trailer for Disney and Pixar's colorful, dreamy, Italian-set animated film Luca is finally here! But if you were like many fans and hoping for some kind of queer romance/representation in it (after all, from what we've seen so far the film visually looks a lot like Call Me by Your Name), well, it looks like you're out of luck...
According to a report from Polygon, Luca director Enrico Casarosa said himself that the film is actually going to have no romance at all, instead, favoring a story about childhood friendship during an age before the distractions of love and relationships.
"I was really keen to talk about a friendship before girlfriends and boyfriends come in to complicate things," Casarosa told Polygon. "This was about their friendship in that pre-puberty world."
From the film's official description, Luca is actually "a coming-of-age story about one young boy experiencing an unforgettable summer filled with gelato, pasta, and endless scooter rides. Luca shares these adventures with his newfound best friend, but all the fun is threatened by a deeply-held secret: they are sea monsters from another world just below the water’s surface."
Considering Pixar's complicated, extremely slow history when it comes to on-screen queer representation in movies — we still can't believe the one-eyed lesbian cop from Onward was toted as "progress," especially since the moment she revealed she was queer lasted for .0002 seconds — the fact there is going to be no romance, queer or straight, in Luca is probably for the better.
As much as we want on-screen representation, queer audiences deserve more than a fumbled-up mess or a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment...
Disney and Pixar’s Luca premieres June 18 on Disney+.
