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What Pixar’s Luca Accomplished Without Trying
And my advice for the young viewers who needed this story: eyes ahead, not down.
If you remember what it was like learning to walk, or more likely (assuming you were born on land like the rest of us) learning to swim or ride a bicycle, you probably recall that the moment it stopped being hard was when you managed to shed the paralyzing anticipation of intending to do it, and without thinking, simply let it happen. Overthinking was how you ended up looking down at your feet on the pedals, or mentally calculating the angle of your arm’s exit from the water, leading inevitably to a teetering fall or a stiff and clumsy stroke, depending. Taking technique to heart, but letting it flow with your own rhythm and reflexes rather than against them — that was how you ultimately silenced your inner saboteur and transitioned into an effortless glide.
Now, effectively training a fish to race in a triathlon might warrant some additional pointers beyond that simple start of course, but I can never resist an analogy. And storytelling nestled within analogy may very well have been one of the keys to how Disney and Pixar’s 2021 film Luca found an unintentional but indisputably powerful resonance with gay audiences, in such a way that no number of cynically market-tested iterations of Disney’s FIRST EVER (We…
