April 28th, 2021 
Jackson Murphy 
Get ready to head to Italy this summer for Pixar’s new feature Luca. It debuts June 18th on Disney+. I’ve screened 30 minutes so far and look forward to seeing the entire film soon. Academy Award nominated director Enrico Casarosa (La Luna), producer Andrea Warren (Cars 3) and effects supervisor Jon Reisch (The Good Dinosaur) preview what to expect. (These interviews were combined and edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: I was first introduced to vespas in another Disney film, The Lizzie McGuire many years ago. I love the fantastical vespa sequences in Luca. They’re so unique. What was your approach to making those sequences?
Enrico Casarosa: Those were so much fun. It was really about bringing whimsy and imagination and a kid’s imagination to that world. It was really wish fulfillment. What is the biggest thing that this kid wants? They really needed to represent their friendship. The vespa is very much freedom… wind in your hair, but it’s also about togetherness. There’s two seats on these things. I just love that it encapsulates that. And on the other side, there’s something preposterous about the idea of, “If we get a vespa everything will be great and we’ll go right into the sunset.” We wanted to find the craziness of it in Alberto’s ideas and plans.
Enrico Casarosa: What I love about that first dream of riding up into the stars is that it’s really Luca bringing to life all these things Alberto is telling him about. In a way it’s way more interesting because it’s not true – that if you went to ride in a vespa and it was regular stars, it wouldn’t be as interesting as crazy anchovies. I love the coming together of two minds: Luca’s crazy, creative imagination and Alberto’s crazy tall tales. It strikes me that Alberto is so confident that I think he believes it. I don’t think he knows that he’s lying. We always talked about this. I think he’s the kind of guy who’s not malicious in his boisterous ways. He just kind of believes it.
Jon Reisch: Those dream sequences in general were a lot of fun and really challenging. For the effects department, one of the big focuses for us this time around was putting the style of our effects, whether that was the water or in the vespa dream sequence the dust. Creating this almost dancing, jumping vespas in that sequence. With the dream sequences… we needed to figure out how to make them special. For the dust, it was straightforward. We had a lot of experience with that coming off of Cars 3. A lot of it was applying the same shape language and making sure we were getting these really clean silhouettes and tamping down on the high detail Enrico was really pulling us away from.
Another really cool dream sequence is the poster in the room where the waves in that sequence… once Luca’s looking at the poster of the vespa and thinking about being free and going and roaming the world, the waves there have shapes that came from a really early test we had done. Ultimately we had scrapped it and moved away from it. But again, we tried to think of something unique for that dream sequence and making it feel like it was a little bit different than what you see in the rest of the film. We went back to it and were like, “There’s something here.” We started pulling it back into the poster dream sequence and then blended in just a touch of the realism we had seen in the regular ocean surface and hit on a look that really worked well.
JM: Andrea, you came onto this in August 2017, just a few months after the release of Cars 3, which you co-produced. What was the transition process going from working on one major Pixar movie to another?
Andrea Warren: It was really fun. I was glad I was able to make that transition because I really was excited about being on this film and working with Enrico. I love the tone of La Luna and the spirit of this film. I was really excited that I was able to work out that timing. I jumped right in for sure. We just started really working on the story. [It was] our big first milestone. It was fun to go from one to the other. I learned so much from doing Cars 3, working with Kevin Reher, the producer. That really set me up to dive into Luca.
JM: Jon, you worked on The Good Dinosaur and some of the rain/water sequences are so real and unbelievable. In working on Luca, what was the difficulty level? Was this the most challenging project you’ve been a part of at Pixar because of what you do differently here with the water?
JR: I think that’s probably true. Every project has its own set of challenges, but for Luca I think because Enrico was so after this lyrical, storybook, simplified look, it really challenged a lot of the preconceptions we have about how we approach waterwork like that. We’ve done great work on The Good Dinosaur and Finding Dory, but this was a completely different look. Coming to it and really having to grow as artists to hit that more simplified, more elegant look to the water was probably the biggest challenge for us on the whole film. With Enrico, if we could draw a picture of water with 50 strokes, he would want us to draw it with three. Really distill it down and make it about the essence of what we’re trying to capture. And I think a lot of that comes from his influences from 2D (including Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli work) and all the great references we pulled from the Japanese woodblock paintings. This very selected hand about where detail gets introduced in the frame.
JM: I watched all six episodes of the CNN Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy series.
EC: I’ve heard about it! I want to see that.
AW: Yeah. Me too.
JM: It’s so good! And it makes the food look scrumptious – every single episode. How is it animating food?
EC: It’s awesome. And not easy because it’s not always appetizing, or immediately appetizing looking. So we really needed to find the right look, and of course you could not find a population – where I’m from in Liguria – that is more serious about pesto. That’s where pesto comes from. We wanted to get that pasta dish right. And then the rest of it was not only looking delicious but it’s actually not easy to have two kids [eating it]. When I showed this to the effects department, they were like, “Oh my gosh. This is difficult to make every single strand work in the computer world.” But they did an amazing job. That’s one of my favorite moments when they start scooping it up like madmen into their mouths. What an amazing job by our effects department in capturing that shoveling. (laughs)
JR: It’s difficult. It’s really difficult. And part of it is because you can go really quickly from something that’s appealing to something that’s really gross. (laughs) There’s a lot of restraint that’s involved in just trying to make sure that it feels funny and it’s entertaining but it’s also not a gross out moment. That was a fun sequence to get involved with. There was a lot of back and forth with our animation team and our effects artists. The animators were kind enough to do a bunch of 2D drawings to show where they envision noodles hanging out of the boys’ fingers or hanging out of their mouths.
And they really, for their animation, kind of pantomiming what they thought the motion might be. As we got in there in effects and then provided the motion on the noodles themselves, a lot of it was just trying to match up and honor what they had in there. And then using our simulators to give a layer of hero simulation of the noodles so they feel like they’re falling and kind of flowing over each other as the boys are really shoveling it all into their mouths.
JM: It’s a really fun moment. Jacob Tremblay came-in for a surprise appearance before the footage began. He mentioned that Lightning McQueen really inspired him when he was young. What are the animated characters that inspired you when you were young?
JR: A lot of the Disney 2D golden age films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Those were the things I was watching on repeat as a kid. And from the visual effects end, I’m definitely a Star Wars nerd at heart, for sure. And it’s been really fun to get to talk with and work alongside some of the folks from ILM. To be able to have cross-studio meetings where we can swap techniques and tips about different types of lightwork that we do, both with Industrial Light & Magic and also our sister studio, Walt Disney Animation Studios.
AW: I was definitely a diehard Saturday Morning Cartoons kid. My friend and I would have our slumber party and get up, and if we were lucky her mom made us pancakes and we just went from one [series] to another. There was a lot of Looney Tunes and some of that big fun animation.
JM: Absolutely. Must-see TV. Enrico, what about you with animated characters. Any cinematic influences?
EC: Oh yeah. So many. The one thing that happened in Italy – and these are slightly off the beaten path to go and find – but Studio Ghibli has their beautiful movies. When I was a kid, it was [Hayao Miyazaki’s] TV series. He was younger and making TV series. One of them is Future Boy Conan. Wonderful TV. 26 episodes. Very inspiring. That is one of the reasons I chased animation. There is something in this TV series that was so inspiring. He’s definitely a huge influence. And then the other side is the golden era of Italian movies. We really enjoyed diving back into [Federico] Fellini and Bicycle Thieves [directed by Vittorio] De Sica. And even the comedies. Divorce, Italian Style and Big Deal on Madonna Street was one we made a little homage [to] in our movie. We had a lot of fun. We have a little [Marcello] Mastroianni homage.
JM: Yeah – the image! It’s so great because it’s always fun when there’s a little live-action element in a Pixar movie. That’s always gonna stand out to people and you’ve got it for sure.
EC: I’ll be really interested to see how many people recognize him and then recognize the movie. Divorce, Italian Style is a dark comedy, like a satire. What an amazing actor.
JM: I’m looking forward to seeing the triathlon. Which part of the triathlon do you think you would excel at the most: the eating, the biking or the swimming?
EC: (laughs) I’ll say… the swimming because I’m a little bit of a fish of a guy. I love the water, and I think I would probably go for that. I like swimming a lot.
AW: Well, I love pasta, so I’m pretty sure I could put a pretty big dent in a bowl of pasta pretty quickly.
JR: For me, it’s gotta be the eating, for sure. I’m a big fan of cooking for my family and food. So I’d be all in on the eating. I’m not a great swimmer or biker, but I can be counted on for the pasta.
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