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Credit: PixarIn the last few years, Pixar has released several coming-of-age films that have depicted various issues children have while growing up. Unfortunately, most of these films have gotten backlash in one way or another, including Turning Red (2022) for showing a girl going through puberty and getting her period and Luca (2021) for having an implied queer relationship between the two main characters. Now, a Pixar co-director has confirmed that an upcoming theatrical release is, in fact, a queer story.
Unfortunately, both of these films were released straight to Disney+ during the COVID-19 pandemic and so none of them performed as well as prior Pixar releases had. In 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis introduced his Parental Rights in Education Act, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and attempted to garner support from businesses across the state. Then Disney CEO, Bob Chapek, refused to announce his support for the bill, or the Governor, leading to an ongoing battle between the Governor and Walt Disney World/the Walt Disney Company.
It’s resulted in several lawsuits between the two, as well as DeSantis dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District and replacing it with his own Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. It’s also led to calls about Disney going “woke,” especially in the wake of their releases in 2023, including a live-action The Little Mermaid release that featured a Black actress, Halle Bailey, as Ariel.
As Disney announced it had been losing profits across the board, including in its theme parks, theatrical releases, and Disney+ numbers, chants of “go woke, go broke” took over the Internet, and became “the boy who cried wolf” against the Walt Disney Company. However, it’s led to current CEO Bob Iger stating that going forward, Disney will be focusing on stories rather than sharing messages in their films, and led many to believe that the company will be backing down from “woke ideology and messages” in their films.
Last month, Variety revealed that Soul (2020), Turning Red, and Luca will be coming to theaters between January and March of this year. With Disney having no major release this year, besides Pixar’s Inside Out 2, it could be the perfect opportunity for these films to gain a bigger audience and help the company recoup some lost profits. With this announcement, Kenna Harris, co-director at Pixar and story lead on Luca took to their Instagram stories to share some of her favorite fanart of the film.
In their stories, they shared several different pieces of fanart, each that showed Luca and Alberto is some sort of romantic situation, including cuddling, laying in bed together, and kissing behind an umbrella. In addition, Harris shared a Spotify version of “Under the Umbrella” from the Little Women soundtrack with the caption, “side note: the song to appreciate this umbrella piece with is by my main man thomas newman. I had a whole sequence in mind of Luca and Alberto reuniting for four summers in a row, culminating in a kiss. oscar-worthy. 10/10.”
With that, Harris seems to have confirmed that Luca and Alberto do have romantic feelings for each other (or at least are/were expected to), and confirmed that they are both queer characters. Since the release of Luca, fans have shared and defended the inherent LGBTQ+ themes of the film and have been supportive of the characters’ queerness. The screenshots of Harris’s stories were compiled and shared in a video to TikTok, which now has over 116 thousand likes and over 2000 comments, all in support of the confirmation and rejoicing over the news.
Despite not being explicitly shown or confirmed in the actual film, the co-director releasing their own fanart of the characters and stating they had pictured them reuniting and having an “Oscar-worthy” kiss is pretty solid evidence. It also proves that Disney has been releasing films with LGBTQ+ messaging or elements for years, something that goes as far back as Mulan (1998). Despite Iger recently stating that future releases will be moving away from “messaging” or even, as some viewers claim “woke ideology,” the upcoming theatrical release of Luca is proving him wrong. As far as any other future original release, well, Disney has always had a message to tell in their stories.
Have you seen Luca? What do you think of this confirmation?