The Frustrating Queerbaiting in Disney Pixar’s ‘Luca’
Image; Disney
Disney released the animated film Luca around the world in late June during the height of Pride month. It’s a movie that features two prepubescent boys in the Italian countryside. They have an incident that prompts them to leave home, sending them on a journey of self-discovery. The film is fairly standard in the coming-of-age genre. You are probably well familiar with the drill at this point.
Since some of the themes in the film focus on hiding your identity and accepting who you are, a lot of queer viewers have picked up on what they perceive to be a queer allegory. Articles such as Richard Lawson’s “Is Luca Pixar’s First Gay Movie? Maybe” have populated the Internet speculating on whether this is one of Disney’s first “gay” characters in a mainstream release (the show Andi Mack takes that title on the Disney Channel). Yet, the fact that this queer interpretation is only subtext has some people frustrated by what they perceive to be queerbaiting.
The problem here, however, is far more systemic and insidious than a single film. Disney does not care about its queer viewers . We are so starved for representation that we are willing to see it where it’s frankly not there.
This conversation naturally asks us to define what queerbaiting even is in the context of media. For our purposes, it’s when a franchise purposefully creates cues that can be picked up on by the greater LGBTQIA2+ community but can easily be discredited by the director or creative team so that a work can be more marketable to a larger (more homophobic) audience.
A classic example of this would be Teen Wolf (2011–2017), where characters Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) and Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien), had a “frenemies” dynamic that is quite homoerotic. This tension was something that the marketing team of the series definitely leaned into. In one promo for the Teen Choice Awards, Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien are on a boat, seductively wrapped around each other. “We are on a ship, pun intended,” Dylan O’Brien says, referencing the fan culture word shipping, which is about fans pairing two characters together romantically. Despite using queerness to pique the interest of queer viewers starved for representation, this relationship would never be defined in the text as anything more than a friendship.
Source: the-twisting-winding-road
Disney also queerbaits a lot. They will often generate a bunch of goodwill in the press by announcing the inclusion of a queer character, only for those characters role to either be small and inconsequential or for the scenes that validate their queerness to be easily ignored. We saw this in 2017 when the character LeFou (Josh Gad) had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, same-sex dance with a minor character at the end of the film. We saw it again in Avengers: Endgame (2019), where director Joe Russo portrayed a gay man in a support group run by Captain America. This trend continued in Zootopia (2016), Toy Story 4 (2019), The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Onward (2020), and Cruella (2021). The scenes that confirm these characters' queerness, assuming that they are explicit at all, are so tiny that they can be cut for releases in countries whose governments are openly bigoted.
Source: The Rise of Skywalker; some groundbreaking shit apparently
Some believe that Luca falls within this trend. There are arguably queer cues sprinkled throughout the movie. The tension between Luca Paguro (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto Scorfano (Jack Dylan Grazer) is palpable. There are many scenes where they hug and show affectionate handing holding — something I am glad we are seeing between two boys in a film, regardless of their orientation. There is one comical scene where Luca has to tackle Alberto for plot reasons. The two fall underneath the table and then re-emerge awkwardly as if nothing has happened.
A queer subtext is also present in the “hidden world” or “masquerade” trope that is the cornerstone of the film. Luca and Alberto are both sea monsters who have the ability to transform into humans but revert back to their underwater form if they touch any water. They have to hide their identities from the human world. Luca faces heavy judgment from his parents for wanting to live more openly. In response to his decision to spend time on the surface, his parents literally threaten to send him to his uncle, who lives in the watery deep, which is a pretty apt metaphor for the proverbial closet. To escape his parent's decision, Luca runs off to the nearest town with his new friend Alberto so that they can live a freer life.
While these sentiments are not exclusively queer (the masquerade can loosely map over to any marginalized identity), it's not hard to understand why many queer people may have felt a subtext here. Many LGBTQIA2+ people have also had conservative parents resorting to drastic means to control their desires, forcing them to flee to a more tolerant nearby city so that they can live more openly. The ending moral of Luca is for you to live among your chosen family, regardless of the hatred that might bring — a message many queer people have had to internalize as an act of survival. “Some people, they’ll never accept him,” remarks the Grandmother near the end, “But some will. And he seems to know how to find the good ones.”
Finally, there is the indirect association with the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name — an Italian film about two gay men having a budding romance in the countryside. This film was a big deal in the queer community, so much so that singer Lil Nas directly referenced it in their hit 2021 song MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name). It was also a popular film from a prestige perspective, snagging an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Disney — a corporation whose job is to be aware of the cultural zeitgeist — definitely would be aware of this film and how themes in Luca might draw some comparisons.
The promotional material never directly validated this subtext, but there were certainly nuggets to satiate representationally-starved Disney fans. The trailer released in February of 2021 had a scene of Luca and Alberto wrapping their arms around each other as they stare off into the sunset. An Italian cover of “You Are My Sunshine” — a song often used as a romantic overture— plays in the background.
Source: Pixar Trailer
Who is Luca’s sunshine, I wonder?
The queer subtext is clearly there, yet we are supposed to believe that all of this is incidental. When asked by a reporter from Polygon at a press day back in April of 2021, the director for Luca, Enrico Casarosa, explicitly stated that this was a movie that didn’t talk about sexual orientation at all. He says: “I was really keen to talk about a friendship before girlfriends and boyfriends come in to complicate things…This was about their friendship in that pre-puberty world.”
While there is nothing wrong with making a film centered on a platonic relationship, this concept of sexuality is inaccurate. Romance and sex are not the same things. Many straight and queer people have romantic desires at an early age, including during their early teens (and even before then). There are also queer, asexual romantics who remain so throughout the course of their lives. Luca and Alberto sit at the ages of 13 and 14, respectively, meaning that they very much would have been at the appropriate age for such a love story to unfold. Like, you know, the dozens of other Disney movies with teenage characters in heterosexual romances (see High School Musical, The Sound of Music, etc.).
It’s impossible to know what director Casarosa really intended with this statement. At its best, his position seems clueless and screams of unexamined homophobia. At its worst, he (and by extension, Disney’s marketing department) used cues easily recognizable by the LGBTQIA2+ community without ever intending to follow through on them. Disney, as a company, knows that they have an intense queer following at this point. There are gay days at Disney World. There are also articles and online communities trying to sift through debatable subtext and turning it into queer gold.
None of this should be a surprise.
Worse, Disney knows that people are annoyed by this pattern of queerbaiting. This exact dynamic was replicated with Frozen II, where there was a queer subtext picked up by fans in the first movie, only for the company to actively deny it. “Elsa is gay” became such a meme that SNL even had a skit where Elsa comes out as gay in a deleted scene. “The lack of any romantic interest doesn’t bother me anyway,” an obviously bothered Elsa, played by Kate McKinnon, sings to her sister Anna.
Source: SNL
There are literally countless articles talking about Disney’s queerbaiting problem. As Ask’s Senior Managing Editor Michael Kasian-Morin remarked following Luca’s release: “Are they really giving us a story like Luca and then completely denying it’s about our community? Will there ever be any actual storytelling about young queer romance? Don’t tease us like this — it’s almost more offensive.”
This situation is frustrating — chiefly because of the obvious hypocrisy. As we have already mentioned, there are stories of heterosexual romance in Disney products. Disney also creates many stories involving male-on-male friendships (see Toy Story, The Lion King, The Jungle Book, etc.). There are no queer protagonists, though, and fans are so starved for representation that they are willing to see it in the most bare-bones of subtext.
Luca is a cute film about friendship and self-discovery. There is nothing wrong with making films about platonic relationships. If you feel “seen” by Disney’s Luca, that’s great. I constantly impose themes into works I know are not there. I have spent hours looking for cues that Leia from Star Wars is a lesbian, and I am currently writing a fanfiction that validates this desire. Believe me; I get it.
Let's make one thing abundantly clear, though, Disney as a corporation does not see you. They are a conservative company that has a record going back a decade of perpetuating obvious queer-baiting. They will eventually get to a point where they are comfortable with openly queer characters (see Out, The Jungle Cruise, etc.), but it will only be after teasing us for years. Stop giving them credit for representation they do not intend to deliver on. There are studios such as Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation (Mitchell vs. the Machines), Laika (ParaNorman), and DreamWorks (She-Ra and the Princess of Power) that will treat you better than this.
You deserve to be someone’s sunshine, not the chum they toss into the bottom of the ocean to attract bigger fish.