Yang, it seems, can “get away” with this sort of humor precisely because he is both Asian and gay, while Gillis is neither.
Are these two boys crushes? Are they friends? Can the movie be an allegory for coming out either way? All you can do is squint until something takes shape.įor more of Slate’s coverage of Luca, check out Dana Stevens’ and Karen Han’s spoiler-filled discussion of the movie on the Spoiler Specials podcast.We study why some jokes land and others don’t – and why the identity of the person telling the joke matters. How gay is it? Whatever the director’s stated intent, the answer seems to be: as gay as you want it to be. Luca seems firmly in this last tradition. Fans have since picked up on homoerotic undertones in Raya and the Last Dragon and the live-action Mulan, but these movies remain rainbow Rorschach tests, with audiences having to read between the lines or project their own meanings to find queer representation. Ironically, the Disney movie that gave us the term “exclusively gay moment” in the first place took a different tack: The live-action Beauty and the Beast’s LeFou is more in the spirit of the studio’s long-standing tradition of strongly queer-coded, if not explicitly gay, villains. Meanwhile, while Disney has congratulated itself and claimed to blaze new trails, plenty of other animation studios have been miles ahead of them: Laika’s ParaNorman, for example, featured an openly gay character way back in 2012. Pixar at least seems to have learned a lesson about making too much of these moments: In Onward, an extremely minor character mentions having a girlfriend, but the character is still just that-extremely minor-even if the filmmakers were smart enough not to herald this development by tooting their own horns. For both live-action and animated movies, the studio has overhyped what have become known as “exclusively gay moments,” tiny morsels of representation that are either so subtle you hardly notice them (a kiss between two women in the background of a Star Wars movie) or so plot-irrelevant that they can be easily chopped or overlooked by international censors (here’s looking at you, Endgame’s unnamed Grieving Man).
But Casarosa has insisted that the movie’s central relationship is purely platonic.
And these jokes were only further encouraged by the fact that the new Pixar movie shares a name with that Oscar-winning queer romance’s director, Luca Guadagnino. The first trailers for the movie-about two boys, one more worldly than the other, growing closer while sharing swims and bike rides in the Italian countryside-invited some inevitable jokes about it being a kiddie Call Me by Your Name. When director Enrico Casarosa says he didn’t intend to make Luca a gay romance, I believe him. This article discusses the ending of Pixar’s Luca.