Two boys on the Italian coast hide their true identities as sea monsters
Marketed as a "coming-of-age friendship story." Five things every parent should know:
1. The film is a documented coming-out allegory. Multiple major outlets — Screen Rant, Slate, Business Insider, The Conversation — describe Luca as a "queer-coded" story about two boys hiding their "true nature" from a society that hates them. Director Enrico Casarosa has deliberately refused to deny this reading, saying the film is about being "open to any difference." This is not parental speculation. This is the film's reception, intentionally left to stand by its makers.
2. Luca and Alberto's intimate physicality. The two boys share stargazing scenes with arms around each other, a shared bedroom in the tower, repeated emotional declarations, and a framing reviewers openly compared to Call Me By Your Name — a film about a sexual relationship between a teenager and an adult man. That comparison is what mainstream press made of the children's film Pixar produced.
3. Pixar considered making Giulia explicitly gay. Variety reported that Pixar executives seriously discussed making the human girl Giulia a lesbian character during development. The plan was dropped, but the version of this film being shown to children was internally developed as an LGBTQ story — and the residue of those deliberations remains in the final product.
4. Parental authority is the villain. Luca's parents forbid him from going to the surface for his own protection. The film frames their protective instinct as oppressive and ignorant. Luca must defy them, deceive them, and sneak away to become his "true self." This is a direct inversion of the Torah's command in Exodus 20:12 and Sha'ul's instruction in Ephesians 6:1–3 — and the inversion is the moral of the story.
5. The "sea monster" inversion. Torah designates many sea creatures as abominations (Leviticus 11:10–12). The film asks children to view the "sea monsters" — creatures biblically framed as unclean — as misunderstood heroes, with the fishing villagers (representing traditional people who recognize what sea monsters are) as the bigoted villains. The moral framework of the entire film is flipped at the foundational level.