The humorist David Sedaris tells of a summer, when he was 12, in North Carolina on Emerand Isle, a place that like Roald Dahl’s Norwegian islands, Deauville for Proust, was more than a seaside resort, it was summer timeless, of growth, the summer of change. In his typical ironic and caustic style, he immerses us in the squabbles of his parents, his mother who boasted of having “more than one house” and in the adventures to buy a villa by the sea. They find a perfect one, to which they give the funniest nicknames: “The TV Antenna,“ The Telephone Pole ”. “The Toothless Black Man Selling Shrimp from the Back of His Van”. “The Cement Mixer”. “The Overturned Grocery Cart”. They will never actually buy it but returning there as adults, they will always refer to that house as “Our House”. The sea for them, “beach people”, Greek by origin, was synonymous with bags of food on the beach, hours under an umbrella. It was a place of discovery, of insights into one’s identity.
If you did a global survey to describe the summers of your childhood, many – with the exception of tragic childhoods – would give an answer that roughly coincides with the age of 11 and a vacation spot, a road trip, a self-construction. and wacky games, a house that everyone calls by different names and the end of innocence, even without drama. In short, the beginning of nostalgia and that feeling of school summers where in September you feel a different person from June. For years David’s father promises his children that he will buy the house, but over time, trust in adults collapses and the Sedaris brothers see him more and more as an actor, while they play the part of the enthusiastic family with less conviction. Sedaris will actually end up buying another house in 2013, proving that nostalgia for sea summers would bring peace to the world and never leave us.
Perhaps because from those waters we literally emerge on the surface, which is no small feat, because our identity begins and sometimes the depth is right on the surface. Luca by Enrico Casarosa (Pixar, on Disney Plus) captures this passage perfectly. The director returns to his version of “our home”, in a pixerized Vernazza. His is not a melodramatic nostalgia but light-hearted as for Sedaris, full of details, colors, flavors. Navigate in the surface, in the lightness, in the suspension, in a shake off those underwater conversations of a still incomprehensible adult world, like when you hear voices underwater.
Pixar sets its films in lands that are always a bit metaphysical, even when it doesn’t seem like it. Some are as obvious as the Mind in Inside Out with the islands of childhood certainties that sooner or later collapse with the complexity of growth; then there is the luminous land of Coco, a customs house between the living and the dead, between wonder and despair; the Great Before in Soul, the “factory” of our soul; some are more subtle like closet darkness before facing fears in Monsters & Co or at the origin when toys come alive in Toy Story, while humans don’t look, in that green ray instant between day and the night when things are possible that is also told in the short film Day&Night, (in Italian When day meets night).
Even Luca, even before being under the sea, even before being in the scenario of Liguria is in one of his pre-adolescent Great Before. Luca is a marine “monster” who lives underwater and develops a total, platonic, formative friendship with Alberto who pushes him to take on human form and who – to steal an expression from the country he celebrates – seems to suggest the transition of puberty in which there is “neither meat nor fish”. Literally here because the boys are sea monsters, fish that on earth become children in flesh and blood, but are not yet completely at ease in learning to walk, in being at the table, they want to win a competition, emancipate, assimilate but also to be accepted as they are. They are insecure in their own body, which is perceived less in childhood, they imitate adults in a clumsy way, they change their appearance.
“Push the boundaries” Steve Jobs would have said, tense in an afternoon at work, or with tears in his eyes in front of thousands of kids or thinking about the foundation of Pixar itself. Growing up is pushing yourself beyond the walls of your home, beyond your physical possibilities (sometimes even stupidly), beyond your emotional and intellectual abilities beyond the pressures of others, hiding secrets from parents, daydreaming an abstract future (there is a song in the musical “Dear Evan Hansen” about a similar male friendship: “The things we’ll do when we get out of school Bike the Appalachian trail or Write a book or learn to sail Wouldn’t that be cool? “).
Luca and Alberto build a Vespa, they meet Giulia who expands their mind and introduces Luca to school, to the scientific universe. There is a paradox in the training summers: they seem unique to us, one with our roots, yet from Maycomb, Alabama to Genoa, they always celebrate that human rite of passage: to go away and become something else. There are elements of the Sorpasso, but also of Stand By Me, Italian inside jokes and universal inside jokes. Japan is perhaps the world‘s expert on the stories of change, of marine summers. There is Ponyo to which Luca is a little inspired. There are manga about puberty with animal metamorphosis, identity exchanges, confusions. In Children of the sea, a bored girl swims in the waters of Tokyo Bay and meets Umi and Sora, two boys who move underwater like birds. They will have to face incredible adventures because the fish are disappearing. Returning to Italy The island of Arturo della Morante stirs the waves and hormones and from the origins of the times sea creatures bring something unspoken to the surface. The teen genre “Scandalo al sole”, the surf musicals of the 50s, are strangely similar to the Italian national-popular world and to “Fatti sent by mamma”. Tides spinning in endless eddies. The covers of American songs, foundations of Italian summers, and the idea of Italy with focaccia and ice cream that makes Americans and the world dream.
One of the voice actors of the Italian version, the comedian Saverio Raimondo, played his character of Ettore Visconti in Italian and English. Ettore is a different bully than usual, who enjoys without much hesitation, like Gassman, making fun of insecure children, who is vain and does not have to teach anything. Saverio Raimondo says he auditioned and was chosen by Casarosa thanks to his stand-up on Netflix.
“I wanted my character to be inspired a little by Fantozzi’s Surveyor Calboni, who bullied him, in an absurd way – explains Raimondo -. It celebrates Italy but also recalls the childhood stories of Truman Capote, it is light and profound, it uses aspects that characterize a country that are not folkloric, but exotic. I improvised on a text that was already perfect, but I tried to give more tones, they invited an interpretation, a creative space ».
Because today, after all, an Italian artist is also the one who perfectly understands the context of international comedians, almost better than in the past, he knows how to translate his own humor and give life to the Pixar version of Italy, a unique goal. And then there is Giulia, the human friend of Luca and Alberto, Fellini’s only in the name, but if she wants it is also Samantha Cristoforetti who goes into space, the ESA engineers who help Elon Musk, the Italian director of CERN Fabiola Gianotti, the Nobel Prize Carlo Rubbia, Adriano Olivetti, high tech wine, a technological avant-garde that we should boast of more, which passes from Leonardo and Galileo and must not be sacrificed, in the name of exaggerated simplicity. Those who only exalt the old days and reject the new practice are a fake nostalgia, the one that creates a world where you would never make a Pixar cartoon. Giulia carries a cart but is closer to those millennials for whom the sound of a modem is more authentic than a mozzarella and linked to modern formative summers.
Of course, in this pandemic year, Luca reminds us that tourism is a resource, and telling about a country is a complex identity challenge because something will always be excluded (Lin Manuel Miranda, talking about his Washington Heights neighborhood, was accused of not having told all the stories every latinx identity group and also in Italy next to those who fished while eating an ice cream, there were also those who translated Steinbeck, but it doesn’t matter too much here). It is no coincidence that tourism was born with Romanticism. It is not just selling a Vespa, but selling an emotion, the ability to build it, what in English is called ingenuity, ingenuity and non-ingenuity, that is, knowing how to invent, knowing how to get by. Italian tourism was also born in this way. And in fact paradoxically today people seem to flaunt more of the “myths” of a past that was actually less uniform. Maybe in the 60s there weren’t the perfect pizzas for Instagram that you see today in Piedmont or the espresso coffees with foam designs, but there was a Great Before, an energy just before a boom broke and perhaps for that many stories they start from there.
The idea of ”riviera” was born as a pre-Romantic and Romantic concept of the melting pot of the Baltic Sea, then also led to Jewish emigration to the Catskills on the lakes above New York: it was born in the eighteenth century in Scarborough in Yorkshire and Heiligendamm in Meckelebrug (Germany) which is the first resort that inspired those of the French and Italian Riviera in the architecture of the buildings, a place that housed and cared for the European aristocracy in body and soul. Going back through the centuries there are spas and vacation spots even in Ancient Greece.
The oceans are all connected. The amount of pre-adolescent characters from the stories and novels and films of the world is known. Sometimes for marketing, but it is inevitably the moment when everything changes: the change of the voice in males, seeing a part of themselves as different, seeing oneself from the outside, losing unconsciousness (Luca and Alberto are dangerous in the eyes of the villagers , and hide the scales).
Luca is a timeless summer with nostalgia for a slightly boomer Italy but also Gen Z, for a fluid world for which a Call me by your name for children is defined online, and young people tweet to Casarosa thanking him for capturing a relationship so pure, a fluid story for deeper and truer reasons than a meme. Or it makes one think of Jack Savoretti, an English singer who is releasing a Europiana album about summers in Portofino. One of the most authentic aspects of the Italian summer, apart from the ice cream, the song Don’t trust a kiss at midnight, the pasta with pesto, are the trains, which also close Call Me By Your Name, assaulted by families in the heat, taken alone children, which mark the transition to adulthood: when you go to your grandparents and they wait for you at the platform, the trains that take you from a village to the cities.
When we open up to the new, beyond the sea borders towards “fish stars”, towards Silicon Valley, towards relationships without barriers, everything passes, flows, is channeled into other forms. Ligurian tourism is the result of local ingenuity and culinary specialties, a Riviera of excellence for centuries, and a fascinating Nature, but the image that gives rise to a dream Liguria, is not purely neorealist, but is that of the stranger at the sea in the Belle Epoque, that of the Gulf of poets in the eyes of the British and American writers of the Grand Tour.
Animation and Romanticism know that monsters are expressionism and therefore reality (ironically a film on Italian typologies is called I Mostri). It will certainly not be a coincidence that Mary Shelley, before writing Frankenstein, saw with her husband, in the waters of Genoa, flashes of sea monsters.