The film treats their secret identities as an all-purpose metaphor for feeling different but never quite finds a way to convincingly connect this idea to the machinations of the plot. Also, the attempt to imbue Luca and Alberto’s monster-ness with deeper meaning feels flimsy at best. And the film boasts at least one memorably funny character, the pompous bully Ercole, who’s voiced by Italian comedian Saverio Raimondo with a nasally bravado that really sells lines like his arrogant query to a crow of kids: “Who wants to watch me eat this sandwich!” Unfortunately, there’s also an episodic, shaggy-dog quality to the plotting that undercuts Luca’s emotional beats. There are plenty of fun little gags in the film, from Giulia’s cheese-based exclamations (“Santa Mozarella!”) to a slapstick set piece in which Daniela and Lorenzo try to find Luca by gleefully knocking kids into a fountain or dumping water on their heads. But they must hide their true identities from the monster-hating people of Portorosso, which isn’t so easy because any time they get wet, they turn back into their true, fish-monster selves. Soon they get wrapped up in Giulia’s mission to win the Portorosso Cup, a triathlon in which participants must swim, eat a giant plate of pasta, and bike up a steep hill, and hope to use their winnings from the race to buy a motor scooter and live a life of contented itinerancy. Having learned of his jaunts ashore, Luca’s parents threaten to send him away to live with his “weird, see-through” Uncle Ugo (Sacha Baron Cohen) in the depths of the ocean, but Luca rebels, swimming off to the nearby fishing village of Portorosso, where he and Alberto make friends with an outgoing tomboy named Giulia (Emma Berman). Montages of Luca and Alberto flying their rickety, homemade scooter off of ramshackle ramps captures the freewheeling spirit of youthful summer days.

Eventually, Luca discovers that there’s more to the human world than unsupervised fun, but at first, the surface is for him a place to be free, to shuffle off the stultifying boredom of his lonely provincial life. If what Ariel wanted more than anything was a kiss from her beloved, Luca and Alberto desire little more than a Vespa. There are obvious shades of The Little Mermaid in this fairy tale-like story of a fish-person making a new life ashore, but Luca plays like a deliberate inversion of that Disney classic, as this proletarian, boy-oriented story about having a good time with friends is far from a sweepingly melodramatic tale of romance among royalty. As long as they remain dry, they look just like any other human being. Though sea monsters in the film typically look like cutesy versions of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, once they leave the water, Luca discovers, their appearance is transformed. It’s only when Luca befriends Alberto, a spirited vagabond who spends his days on shore and sleeps in an abandoned tower, that he discovers there’s plenty of fun to be had on dry land. Luca lives a sheltered life under the sea, herding goatfish and giving humans a wide berth at the behest of his over-protective mother, Daniela (Maya Rudolph), and absent-minded father, Lorenzo (Jim Gaffigan).

Possessing only a fraction of the studio’s trademark emotiveness and none of the grandiose conceptualism of, say, Soul, Enrico Casarosa’s film feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas, with Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) as fun-loving fish-monster equivalents of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Though it’s less sharply crafted and endearingly odd than Brad Bird’s film, Luca is also a low-stakes entry in the Pixar canon. A sun-baked idyll about two young sea monsters on the Italian Riviera, Luca is easily Pixar’s most intimate and laidback effort since Ratatouille.

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