La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957)
I could do another entry on the whole of another filmmaker’s collective work due to Enrico Casarosa’s acknowledged love for Federico Fellini, as well. But while he explained to me that Fellini is a key influence on him and on Luca, and he specifically cited I Vitelloni (1953) and 8 1/2 (1963), both of which he’s gone deeper into elsewhere, if any single person seems deserving to be at the header of this entry, it’s Fellini’s wife and sometimes muse, Giulietta Masina. However, I went with just two of her on-screen collaborations with her husband — La Strada and Nights of Cabiria — because Casarosa names them specifically, and the former is even directly referenced in Luca in the form of another one of the movie posters hanging around Portorosso.
What are the things that we absolutely love? Sometimes we study? And then they slowly find their way in it. The reason I put ‘La Strada’ there, and I don’t know if you read this anywhere, but Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, is this iconic, beautiful actress who had this innocence and this kind of very unique look. In both ‘La Strada’ and ‘Nights of Cabiria,’ you can’t help but fall in love with this character. So much of her was pantomime, especially in ‘La Strada,’ and in her eyes.
I remember when we animated the kid in ‘La Luna,’ I showed the animators snippets of these wonderful moments from ‘La Strada’ and ‘Nights of Cabiria’ to kind of show them that, oh, I think there is something in Giulietta Mssina that we should bring to the kid. It was this sense of wonder, joy, curiosity. That’s a whole other thing that I always absolutely loved about Fellini’s movies. Then you know he kind of left her behind and he focused on [Marcello] Mastroianni in all these other movies. So that’s earlier Fellini where his wife was really in the middle of it. She was unique.
La Luna (2011)
While he’s not explicit about it, I believe what Enrico Casarosa says above about Giulietta Masina’s inspiration on the kid in La Luna also applies to the kids in Luca (maybe particularly the kid similarly named Giulia?). And even if that weren’t the case, that inspiration would still carry forth into the new animated feature by way of the Oscar-nominated animated short. How can Casarosa’s own earlier film be an influence on his new film? I certainly think you can be an inspiration to yourself and also that a filmmaker’s past works can be a piece of the genetic makeup of their later works — the celestial daydreams in Luca are very reminiscent of the lunar fantasy of La Luna — and Casarosa’s comments below support the idea, especially regarding one link.
I definitely wanted to find a way to find that feeling in the long-form, which was honestly one of the challenges because if you make too many things lyrical then nothing is lyrical. You need to find contrasts. I think we ended up in a good place where we’re able to actually solve the problem of trying to get a little bit inside an introvert’s mind. That was one of the things when we were scripting where, oh, you know, we want this kid to be the kid who’s struggling, who’s timid, but it can be difficult to get behind a character like that. I think it solved that problem of seeing what’s in his head and also how do we bring some of that wonderful surreal whimsical side.
Part of that becomes me being a bit of a nerd about the whole fantasy of cosmology. I remember, for example, that I was on Twitter and saw this beautiful old, old illustration of Saturn that said if there was a bathtub big enough it would float in it because it’s so light. I was like, okay, that gives me images. I just think that’s wonderful, and that’s why I put it in the movie because I was like, oh, that is so cool. Me being a little bit of a goofy nerd makes it then, oh, okay, we can give that line to Giulia. And then the fantasy is a little more interesting because there’s water. So I think I definitely wanted to do that.
And then interestingly when we started thinking like, oh, it’s so cool that Alberto’s giving him wrong information, we could actually make something even more fanciful. Because he didn’t have the correct things. Imagination gets rolling at the edges of what we don’t know. I actually find that really fascinating. The same way sea monsters on maps were like at the edge of the sea — we don’t know what it is, so we make up stuff: there are some sea monsters. I feel now the universe is like that. That’s why I thought it would be fun to talk about it a little bit in the movie, the edge of what we don’t know. There are stories that want to be made or images that want to be made about it. I definitely embrace that.
I’ll say that also I love when filmmakers — since we’re talking about other filmmakers — so, I was re-enjoying Wes Anderson’s movies now that my daughter is thirteen; she’s just at the age where she can kind of now share some of those. She had seen ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ and ‘Isle of Dogs,’ so she had seen the animation side, but now we showed her all the others, and I could see her eyes sparkle every time Bill Murray would show up on screen in the different movies. And so I was like, there’s something wonderful about what Wes Anderson does in the expected. The usual suspects are kind of a charming thing. We never do it in animation. I joke, but I say I hired the same dad for a different part, from the short to the feature.
That’s something that came to my mind of, well, it’s kind of cool, right? That we can connect a little bit and there’s this recognition. I would like to keep a little bit of that vibe. That was the intent, that they’re pretty close. Some of it is what do I like to draw, but the other side was like, yeah, maybe let’s recast him. That could be Mastroianni for Fellini; he’s just a different part.
Related Topics: Enrico Casarosa, Hayao Miyazaki, Luca, Movie DNA, Pixar
