Luca director Enrico Casarosa Zooms in from his studio in California. It’s 2 p.m. and he swears that he already had lunch. After being nominated for an Academy Award for his short film La Luna and recognized for his appetizing storyboarding in the food-focused film Ratatouille, Casarosa was more than prepared to direct, write, and draw mouthwatering scenes of Genovese food from the Italian Riviera for his first animated feature film, Luca, out today from Disney and Pixar and available to stream on Disney+. The film follows the adventures of 12-year-old sea monster Luca as he explores land and sea for the first time, allowing us to experience Italy with fresh eyes and playful innocence.
As we speak about the incredible gleaming basil leaves in trenette al pesto and the crunchiness of the thin focaccia from his childhood in Genoa, Casarosa seems to be making himself hungry again.
Food colors the world of Portorosso, a fictional fishing town inspired by Cinque Terre on the Ligurian Coast of Northwest of Italy, where the film takes place. (See La Cucina Italiana's guide to 10 Excellent Restaurants in Cinque Terre.) Old ladies eat gelato, kids munch on street food, and families invite friends over for bowls of simple pasta. When children swear, they use the name of cheeses: Santa Pecorino! Santa Gorgonzola! Santa Mozzarella!
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To create the atmosphere for the film, Director Enrico Casarosa took inspiration from childhood food memories on the Italian Riviera and scenes from the Golden Age of Italian cinema. In this memorable scene, the sea monsters Luca and Alberto eat pasta with pesto for the first time at the home of their friend Giulia.
Italian cinema would not be complete without epic food scenes, and Luca adds to the canon. Casarosa says that he wanted to honor the movies of the “La Dolce Vita” era. When the two main characters, Luca and Alberto, try trenette al pesto for the first time, we see strands of basil-soaked pasta flying as they lose themselves in the meal prepared by the one-armed fisherman father of their new friend Giulia. The satisfying meal becomes a permanent bond for the friends, who are then invited to spend the night in Giulia's tree house. Casarosa storyboarded that meal scene, and says that he drew upon experience creating appetizing food for Ratatouille for this movie as well.
Even when the film ventures deep under the sea, food serves as an anchor for family and friendship, and often, it tugs on the appetite. Here, Casarosa tells La Cucina Italiana his thoughts on how he made Italian food come to life in Luca and more.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
The film is inspired by your childhood friendships and summers in Liguria and Genoa. What are some of your most important food memories from being a kid?
I remember the pesto. That's all over Genoa. Grandma's pesto was not small. It was a big thing. But trofie is really the main dish I remember loving. It’s special, because it’s fresh pasta. And so, of course, that makes it a little more special in the moment, right? And there would be meat ravioli with ragù at Christmas. That’s less specifically Ligurian, but those were some of my lovely memories. And focaccia! You grow up with it all around you. You're running from school and you stop at the bakery. You know which one has the different style, the slightly harder one, the crunchy one, the softer one. Genoa and focaccia absolutely go together.
My grandma lived in Recco. It’s famous for focaccia al formaggio, which is actually a very specific thing. It’s very thin and served with stracchino cheese. Everyone comes from all over Italy to have that specific bread. As a kid, my uncle would come from Milan and the bakery was always the first stop for him, so I realized “Oh wow! This must be special because he appreciates it.”
In the film, we get to experience Italy through the eyes of Luca and his friend Alberto, two sea monsters, who explore a small fishing village of Portorosso for the first time as boys. What were some impressions that you wanted us to understand about life in Liguria in the 1950s/60s, and how is food part of that?
We talked a lot about the little town experiences that I had as a kid and what makes a very special small town in Italy what it is. Many of these conversations were with Daniela, our production designer, who lived for two years in Lazio. We looked for these beautiful– almost theatrical–opportunities for vignettes, and thought of the small town like a beautiful set. That is what the piazza feels like. We wanted old ladies gossiping, talking, looking on, and observing. They probably should be snapping string beans or peeling onions or potatoes! And of course, there is a bar where they have coffee in the morning. They have espresso. That’s a big thing for me as I am a big coffee drinker.
And the other thing: We wanted this small town to have a sense of blue collar-ness. Liguria is a tough land, where there's a history of hard work, because of all the walls and terracing that’s needed. And the fishing jobs are always dangerous. This land has beautiful olive trees, lemon trees, and of course, vineyards. The amount of miles and miles of terraced land is fantastic, and I wanted to convey that. Because the people are hardworking and what the land produces is part of it, we had people carrying chests of grapes to show that it’s summer time, but it's not like everyone is in flip-flops and sunglasses. I was interested in the period when it was almost untouched by tourism. We wanted to show a little bit of modernity and dolce vita with Bar Giotto, where the cool kids go to listen to the jukebox and have a soda. There’s also the latteria, where they can have gelato. We fit a cinema in there, too.
Maybe that was not true of the Cinque Terre, but we wanted to make many fun homages to the Golden Age of Italian cinema throughout the movie with references to films like The Bicycle Thief and La Strada. I think of Alberto Sordi having his pasta in that famous scene. In a lot of things, we were looking for beautiful references, so that the props are captured in the right way and the kitchen. Even the way they are eating the pasta, and how much they are enjoying the pasta.
Pasta has a strong presence throughout the movie. A pasta brand is the sponsor of the triathlon competition that Luca becomes obsessed with. What does pasta represent for you as an Italian?
Pasta looms large even more than pizza, because it feels more ancient. The irony of it all is that I am gluten-intolerant, so I have to live in the world of gluten-free pasta. But when I go back to Italy, I always say it's good for the soul to have it all. You don't say no to your mom’s lasagna! It's the most amazing thing with bechamel and ragù. I just talked to her and she needs to prepare for it, because I’m traveling there next week. The first dish that I have is usually that one. And pasta is so many things. When I think about it, it’s the everyday. You make it for lunch. My dad will ask me, “Are you having pasta for lunch?” and I'm like, “No, not really. Not in the U.S.” But in Italy that’s absolutely the case. It’s all over the place! Spaghetti, spaghettata. The idea of spaghettata is that it's not a spaghetti. I don't even know how to translate; it’s like the dish you have everyone come over for. It's fast, it’s blue collar, it's like we’re going to dig in. And it's so fun! Honestly, in Italy we don't have food races or anything because it's a little antithetical to eat until you're sick, but playfully, when we looked at this idea of a triathlon we wanted to bring in something Italian. We didn’t want them to eat until they exploded, but thought, let's give them a plate of pasta right in the middle of it all. That felt right even though it’s not idiosyncratic to the culture.
Sea monsters Alberto and Luca become friends after realizing another world above the sea exists for them. Together, they courageously explore the town of Portorosso, a small fishing village inspired by Cinque Terre, eating pasta for the first time, entering a triathlon competition, and becoming close with a smart underdog named Giulia.
When Luca and Alberto eat pasta for the first time with their bare hands, how did you create these scenes? Did you use real people, then animate?
There were two things. I storyboarded the scene of them eating. We wanted it to be odd and show them not being able to stop eating and going completely crazy. We had fun with the drawings. When we went to the animator, Cody, he looked at YouTube videos—some you wouldn't want to watch, it’s not appetizing—and then he went to town. The other part of it was the final specificity. When we did the trenette al pesto, I remembered the traditional way to make it in Genoa. You put the string beans and potato, which are not always in pesto, into the boiling pasta water. That is part of the traditional way to do it, and it’s a fun little detail. We wanted to make sure to capture those kinds of details that resonate with the Genovese. And the other side that was really fun was that I made sure to give the marble mortar to Giulia. I wanted to give that to her, because that's so much a part of the tradition of pesto.
Is Italian food difficult to draw?
For sure, when there’s a lot of movement, it’s difficult. Those noodles, the trenette, were chosen because they would be the messiest. When you ask the effects artist how to make it work, they will say, “Oh, that's hard.” But they should be proud of the result. When anything moves, it becomes technical. Those shapes require tricky simulations with the computer, and it requires a lot of painstaking effects to make the work sing. The animator has to imagine 15 strings of trenette, and I love it. That’s why we didn't make it trofie, because that pasta is short and it would be less cinematographic. The trenette are more difficult but more fun! And they had to be tasty. Ratatouille was the first time that I worked so hard to make food look tasty. We had already done it, and it was really fun this time to make the Italian version.
Even the basil had a beautiful gleam and tenderness.
Yes, basil is very special to the Genovese. If they don’t get their good basil, they won’t make their pesto. There’s a great Ligurian restaurant in San Francisco. I dont think it's there anymore. They’d be like, ‘Sorry, we couldn't make it. The basil wasn't good enough.’
The film is about friendship and exploration between three friends, but it is also about a young girl showing two seamonster boys from a different world around Liguria. We see how they nervously eat Italian food for the first time with her father, a burly fisherman, and eventually, fall in love with what’s different and unknown to them and vice versa. Were any of these scenes inspired by real events in Italy? Say foreigners and refugees coming to Italy for the first time?
What I love, and what we thoughtfully introduced in the movie, was the sense of otherness. From day one, it felt right for the kids to feel it, because it's also that age for a million different reasons where we feel odd and out of place. So having had this privilege of having grown up there, this was my version of it. But I knew people would be projecting more sides and sometimes dire sides of that experience. It felt very important to represent how curiosity becomes this bridge; it’s a connection and a friendship with otherness. We had a lot of conversations about it, and we felt it was important to leave it open for projection, because you want to bring people in to feel their own difference.
I hope sea monsterness can be read in many different ways. The social upheaval of the last year had us thinking deeply about this. Like the fact that we didn't want to sugar coat our ending. We have a wonderful line that I love and it had to be very carefully done. It was the grandma telling Luca’s mom, “Listen, I know you're worried that not everybody will accept and love him, but he seems to know how to find the good ones.” It was like the sense of the world is complicated but if you find the right friends, connection and curiosity can bridge these things. Xenophobia has been so polarizing throughout the world, we definitely thought of it. I’m glad it's coming through. It’s a complex problem in Italy, and any way to talk against any sort of racism or xenophobia felt important.
