Metacritic reviews

Luca is sweet and affecting, capturing the bond that strangers can build over a summer, and how that friendship can endure. And like its shape-shifting protagonists, it’s got plenty going on beneath the surface.

Director Enrico Casarosa is making his feature-length debut here, and he and the vast Pixar animation army have delivered a gorgeous and lovely coming-of-age fantasy with plenty of slapstick laughs, the obligatory heartwarming family moments and a friendship for the ages.

It may not be the best Pixar movie, or the riskiest — it sure as hell isn’t the most ambitious — but Luca is also one of the precious few that feels like it isn’t afraid to be something else.

If this is a story told more broadly than what we’ve seen from Pixar the past few films, so be it. It may not be a masterpiece, but its message is one that can’t be expressed enough. Luca expresses it in a gorgeous, fun way.

It’s a nice message, told with charm aplenty. And as always, the Pixar magicians create a wonderfully populated world.

Granted, Luca might not go down as one of the more profound entries in the Pixar catalog. Don’t expect it to make you well up the same way Up or Toy Story 2 did. Still, at a time in which international travel is mostly for the bold, it’s an undeniably pleasant summertime trip.

The generous read on Luca is that it has the sweet simplicity of a fairy tale, something that tired kids and the exhausted parents reading to them could follow even while on the verge of slumber. Less euphemistically, this is an exceptionally mild addition to the Pixar canon, pleasant but nearly as shallow as a bathtub.

Luca has energy to spare and it’s certainly easy on the eyes, if not as visually outrageous as, say, the recent Coco. The moral lessons — be true to your friends, overcome your fears — are tidy and shopworn, fresh to young audiences but lacking the jolts of originality that make classic Pixar films an all-ages proposition.

While some material may hit with younger audiences, Luca makes for Pixar’s least enchanting, least special film yet.

Disney/Pixar’s animated “Luca” is “The Little Mermaid” without the heart, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” without the laughs. It’s a gorgeous-looking time-killer aimed at a very young and undemanding audience.