Fridge / Luca

Fridge Brilliance

• Luca's surname is Paguro, meaning "hermit crab" in Italian. Likewise, Alberto's surname, Scorfano, means "redfish". Both their names connect to sea creatures and allude to their identity as sea monsters.
  • Luca's surname also foreshadows his character arc: hermit crabs are shy and quickly retreat into their shell homes in the face of threats. However, they inevitably need to leave their homes and find new and better-fitting ones, because hermit crabs naturally outgrow them. Luca's shy and has difficulty facing his fears, but as he grows his courage and desire to do and see more in the world rapidly outpace that fear, and the stages of this growth are mirrored by him leaving his home for first Portorosso and then his and Giulia's school in Genova.
  • Alberto's surname also holds interesting significance, as it can mean either "redfish" or "Scorpionfish". Scorpionfish tend to live solitary lives near the ocean floor and have a "sit-and-wait" method for hunting, where they snatch things that get too close. Alberto holds a lot of loneliness living on the island after his father left him, and he gets Luca onto the surface by literally fishing him out (with the Shepard's crook he stole from him), and has difficulty letting him go.
• Luca has the same first name as The Godfather's Luca Brasi. Why? Because they both sleep with the fishes.
• In the beginning, Luca was herding a school of goatfish, bored with his lot in life. In the end, Luca heads off to go to an actual school with Giulia. The story is about Luca leaving one school for another school.
• Alberto has green eyes and is a sea monster. His main conflict also comes from his jealousy that Luca spends more time with Giulia than him. He's literally a green-eyed monster.
• Alberto's lines in Italian, untranslated, demonstrates his unwillingness to admit when he doesn't know something. This is best shown when Alberto speaks some Italian words when teaching Luca his secret handshake. The words are actually directly related to the handshake, but when Luca asks him what they mean, Alberto quickly changes the subject because he doesn't know. Which serves as his Establishing Character Moment of being a Know-Nothing Know-It-All.
• Machiavelli is initially distrustful of Luca and Alberto. Of course he would be. He's a cat. He's probably wondering why these two boys smell like dinner.
• After Luca falls off his bike, fish circle around his head instead of stars. This makes sense, seeing that he thinks the stars in the sky are fish.
• Why does Alberto keep telling Luca his parents won’t search for him? Because his own father abandoned Alberto a long time ago, and he‘s given up on him returning. It helps that Luca told Alberto about his parents sending him to the deep end, so he thought they will forget about Luca after a while.
• Sprinkled with some Fridge Sadness, another likely reason why people in Portorosso see Giulia as "some weird kid who doesn't belong" and she doesn't seem to have close friends until Luca and Alberto is because she's the only one who actively stands up to Erocle and everyone's so afraid of him that associating themselves with her would earn his bullying. A scene where a group of kids cheering the new kid Luca as he trains resulted in Ercole shooing them away in anger.
• "Pinocchio" seems like a very appropriate book for Luca to be interested in. The story mirrors to Luca's own story: a less-than-human child who makes a friend with another boy (Lampwick/Alberto), runs away from his worried-sick family (Geppeto/Daniela and Lorenzo), and is trying to achieve their dream (Pinocchio's being his humanity and Luca's to see the world). Unto itself, both kids are also trying to fit in somehow and (in varying ways) become a "real boy".
• At one point during their training, Alberto tries to ride the bike down Portorosso's hill with Luca, similar to how they first bonded (by riding their hand-made Vespa down the hill). But the ride isn't fun and instead feels chaotic and rocky, ending with them crashing into the sea. This leads to their Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure, which symbolizes how Alberto's jealousy caused a rift between him and Luca. The second time they ride down the hill, Luca is the one in control and rides the bike throughout the entire race, with the intention of saving Alberto and their friendship. Even though this ride is also chaotic, Luca and Alberto are able to work as a team this time, showing their friendship has reignited. Both scenes frame Alberto's arc: he needs to support Luca's desire to go to school so he has control of his own life.
  • The symbolism also extends to the circumstances of whose steering the bike each time. The very first time they ride the bike on the island, Alberto is the one steering with Luca riding behind as, at this early point in their friendship, Luca admires Alberto and, while scared, is curious enough to trust him to steer. The second time when they are training with Giulia, Alberto is steering again, but, this time, it's by force, with him planting himself in front and taking off without warning despite Luca's protests and efforts to learn how to ride it himself, which represents Alberto's growing jealousy clashing with Luca's newfound independence. The third and last time is during the race: Luca is steering this time instead, and Alberto happily takes a literal backseat, showing that he's grown beyond his issues and is supportive of his friend.
• When Alberto pulls Luca to the surface with his own shepherd's crook, it reflects a nice symbolism that Luca was living out his life no different than his own sheep: going with the flow and following the life that's been laid out for him. This frames how Luca's character arc is learning to break away from what others want of him and follow his heart. He learns that this growth is not without some hurt as his growing ability to stand up for himself comes in the form of throwing Alberto under the bus when Giulia cowers at seeing the "sea monster".
• Sprinkled with some Fridge Heartwarming, even though Luca is upset with Alberto for not knowing how to do things right, he still asks Guilia, "We were wondering if we can come with you to your school" He intended to take Alberto with him still seeing him as a friend.
• In a way, Uncle Ugo is actually Luca and Alberto's Shadow Archetype. He's a cautionary tale of what would happen to Alberto if he remained isolated, and a reflection of how Luca would be if he had stuck with being afraid of the surface to the point of never exploring it.
• Why did Giulia throw up during her previous attempt at the cycling portion of the Portorosso Cup? Because the Cup’s designed to be played in teams of three participants, each tackling one of the three challenges (swimming, pasta eating, and cycling). Giulia, however, entered the contest alone, meaning she had to do all of them herself. The pasta eating takes place before the cycling, and without another teammate to handle the pasta, she didn't have time to properly digest the food she’d just eaten.
• The revelation that Alberto is a Minor Living Alone isn't just important to explain his character, it retroactively explains part of the film's external conflict between the sea monsters and the fishermen of Portorosso. The opening scene with the fishermen makes clear that there was, until recently, skepticism over the existence of sea monsters. This is probably because, despite living close by and in shallow enough water to receive plenty of light from the surface, Luca's village is very careful not to be seen. But the impulsive Alberto was a child alone without guidance who actively resists the voice of caution, and so he did highly visible and reckless things like stealing from fishermen and leaping over boats that got reported and even photographed, re-convincing the town of both the existence and hostility of sea monsters and inspiring the very bounty that got him attacked by Ercole.
• While Alberto's different lifestyle and adventurous spirit initially enables Luca greater freedom to sate his curiosity and explore, Alberto's insecurities and fears actually make him a bit like the family Luca ran away from as the film goes on.
  • Like Daniela, once Alberto sees Luca changing in ways he doesn't like, Alberto tries to use the threat of danger and exposure to keep Luca from changing further or exploring possibilities when these desired changes go beyond what Alberto can handle.
  • Both Alberto and Daniela are okay with Luca changing, but only in ways they are comfortable with—Alberto wants Luca to be at his side and encourages him to be braver and more outgoing, but also wants him to live with no other influences outside of Alberto; Daniela was okay with the massive implied life change that is sending her son away to the Deep if it avoided the changes and risks that came with him going away to the surface.
  • Both Alberto and Daniela assert to Luca that they know how the world is without actually being interested in hearing Luca's counters. Luca realizing this is the point where both relationships break into conflict.
  • Both, at their most extreme moments, ignore how Luca feels but demand that he complies with their idea of how his life should be through the validity of their bond with him (explicitly with Daniela, who pairs reminders that Luca knows she loves him with her increasingly restrictive behavior; implicitly with Alberto, who relied on the assumed strength of his bond with Luca when exposing himself as a sea monster to try and force a wedge between Luca and Giulia, and feels betrayed when Luca does not follow his lead and turns on him).
  • This is why it was important for Alberto's character arc that he not only accept and support Luca's different interests and let Luca go to school without him, but is the one to convince Luca's family, particularly his mother, to do the same.
• Rewatching the subtleties in Luca's and Alberto's interactions leading up to their confrontation on the beach gives Luca's conflict during that confrontation a lot more layers than just loyalty to friendship and being true to yourself vs. fear of exposure. Prior to their confrontation, Alberto repeatedly insisted on taking the leadership role and acted like he could guide and take care of Luca if Luca just followed his lead, but he slowly was revealed to Luca as a Know-Nothing Know-It-All who blatantly dismissed Luca's thoughts and feelings if Alberto himself didn't share them, and when Luca confronted him on this, he shoved Luca into a False Dichotomy to try to make Luca give up the only other friendship Luca had ever made at the expense of all of their efforts in Portorosso, which Alberto had asked Luca to trust him to lead. Alberto seriously betrayed Luca's trust by falsely presenting himself as capable of guiding and taking care of Luca, getting territorial over who gets to decide what's best for Luca, putting his jealousy before Luca's wellbeing, and now trying to use Luca's fear to manipulate him, so it's understandable that, when forced to make the choice under pressure, Luca chose not to follow Alberto's lead and instead protected his relationship with Giulia, since his relationship with Alberto was already taking serious damage. Standing by Alberto would've been staying loyal to their friendship, not giving into fear and the need for conformity, and not hiding who he was, but also rewarding Alberto's toxic behaviors at Luca's significant expense. Conversely, by the second time Alberto is exposed in front of humans and Luca makes his very different choice, Alberto and Luca have both clearly fixed their various Skewed Priorities and all the friends in the trio prioritize each other's wellbeing first and foremost, rather than fighting over unnecessary divisions due to secrets and emotional baggage.
  • Alberto encouraged Luca to be bolder and stand up to his fears and insecurities, telling them "Silenzio, Bruno!" The escalation of Alberto's and Luca's conflict comes from Alberto ending up on the receiving end of that very character growth because Alberto himself starts voicing Luca's fears and insecurities. Alberto's voice "becoming" Bruno's also reflects how Alberto's actions are increasingly being controlled by his own insecurities.
    Alberto: "What happens when she sees you? When anyone sees you?”
  • Alberto and Luca don't just fight each other during their conflict, they flip on themselves. Alberto turns against Luca and risks both of their safety by outing himself to Giulia just to spite Luca's growing desires for more than just Alberto's company, all while talking like "Bruno," his character antithesis—because with Luca becoming braver, bolder, and more educated than he was previously, Alberto doesn't feel as needed by Luca if Luca doesn't listen to "Bruno." (This is also why Alberto acts like a Know-Nothing Know-It-All—because he desires Luca to see what he says as important). Luca turns against Alberto, pretends to be afraid of him, and decries his "revealed" identity as a sea monster despite being one himself and being raised in a community where sea monsters are normal and humans are the ones that are distinctly other and terrifying—because that's how he's afraid (and expects) Giulia will react, and now that he's not taking cues from Alberto, he's started taking his cues from her. At the resolution of their conflict, Luca the former Protectorate completes his arc by incorporating what both his friends have taught him but taking full charge of his own plans instead of following Giulia's or Alberto's leads, and Alberto's relationship with Massimo, a responsible parental figure, relieves the pressure of his former dependence on being "needed" by Luca.
• While it was a very quick turnaround, the sudden loss of murderous intent from most of the town towards sea monsters makes at least a little bit more sense when you consider that all of their artistic depictions of sea monsters were of non-humanoid fictitious animals resembling whales or serpents. Most if not all probably thought the "sea monsters" in the bay were unidentified predatory animals. When Luca and Alberto are revealed, they've been interacting with the town and its residents for about a week, and they're outed during a children's bike race, politely passing fellow contestants and going back for a fallen teammate who might be injured. It's hard to argue with the fact that they are indeed what the town would consider "sea monsters," but it's even harder to argue with the fact that they're clearly children, and hunting children is a lot harder to morally swallow. When other more long-term members of the community reveal themselves to also be sea monsters, it makes sense that the town as a whole loses the will to hunt them in the moment. Hunting vicious predatory animals is one thing to gear your mind for—hunting those you've already mentally recognized as people, while fully within the scope of human cruelty, was never something Portorosso prepared itself to face. While there's almost certainly still fear and prejudice and maybe some hunters will resolve themselves to continue their hostility after the shock fades, it also makes sense why they would so quickly back down in the moment. After all, most people aren't actually Axe-Crazy like Ercole.
• Ercole makes sense as an antagonist not just because this film is a nostalgic throwback to classics that often had ridiculously hostile bully characters, but because he represents what the sea monsters have been hiding from the entire time they stayed hidden under the sea. He doesn't attack them out of fear or misunderstanding; the conflict with him can't be resolved through a recognition of shared personhood. He attacks them because he cares nothing for any other living being be they sea monster or human, seeking only to benefit himself and lord his power over others and hurt them. He's a true 'land monster', and defeating him is another instance of the film's theme of defeating fear.
• Ercole acts as a kind of Shadow Archetype for Luca and Alberto:
  • Luca and Ercole both have some cowardly tendencies, both of which end up harming someone else (Ercole’s fear of losing makes him act like an asshole and abuse Ciccio and Guido, and eventually make him act violently towards the Underdogs, while Luca hurts Alberto when he pretends not to be a sea monster for fear of exposure). That being said, Luca proves to overcome his fear and become more confident in his dreams and wishes, while Ercole is controlled by his disgust and fear of sea monsters, costing him his reputation and the race he wanted to win so badly.
  • Ercole and Alberto both hold controlling tendencies towards their friends, as, while Ercole orders Guido and Ciccio around and expects them to follow them completely, Alberto is very possessive of Luca and wants him to give up his dream of going to school in favor of what Alberto wants, to the point of jealousy and hostility. The key difference is that Alberto genuinely cares for Luca and is a very lonely child, and he ultimately puts Luca’s happiness first by selling the Vespa. Ercole’s friends get tired of his abuse and promptly leave him in the dust because of his refusal to self-reflect.
  • Luca's arc is defined not only by a desire to step outside of his comfort zone, but also a desire to grow and step from childhood into young adulthood, which leads to his ambition to go to school with Giulia. By contrast, Ercole is very plainly in his mid-teens but continues to pretend at being a child, submitting himself to the Triathlon every year - probably because he prefers being the biggest kid amongst kids.
• Luca starts off as a naive sea monster wearing a simple green tunic of seaweed, but after he meets Alberto and gets a first taste of the surface world, he switches to his plaid shirt and cargo pants. Finally, when he goes to school with Giulia, in the credits, he's dressed in a proper school uniform, showing his assimilation into the human world (though some images show him barefoot, showing that he's still tied to his home and family). Meanwhile, Ercole starts off dressed quite nicely, and spends his first few scenes being an otherwise harmless jerk. Over the course of the race, he becomes more unhinged and violent, and, as a result, becomes more dirty and disheveled. As Luca becomes more human, Ercole becomes the real monster of the two.
  • Tying back into the movie's theme about overcoming your fears, Luca's overcoming of his fears allows him a world of possibilities, and allow him to learn more about the world, something he's always wanted. Ercole, by giving into his fears of losing and to the inhuman Luca and Alberto, ends up ruining both his chances of winning, his (already weak) friendships, and his reputation.
• Alberto's attachment to Luca and his dream of living with him as nomads makes more sense when you consider that, since his father abandoned him, he may have subconsciously considered Luca to be his replacement family. This is why he gets so upset when he thinks Luca is moving on from him, and why he expects Luca to live with him presumably forever; Alberto needs the care of an actual adult to give him long-term affection and stability, not another child whose equally as immature and impulsive as he is, and is also on his own journey of development.
• Why were Alberto and Luca creating Vespas, only to drive them off the ramp into the ocean? Well, the poster Alberto has in his lighthouse demonstrates the driver flying across the open sea, so it's likely that Alberto and Luca both initially interpreted this to mean that Vespas are used to fly all over the world. This explains why, in Luca's Imagine Spot, he pictures himself flying across the ocean on one, and also why Alberto insists that they can use one to travel anywhere they want to, because it wouldn't be limited to land travel.
• The trailers implied that Massimo would be the antagonist (by having him say he kills "anything that swims"), but in the actual movie, he's a supportive and caring father figure. In other words, he was a red herring.
• It can seem like Massimo, a career fisherman and hunter of sea monsters, changes his mind about them pretty quickly compared to other characters. In earlier drafts of the movie, he was meant to have lost his arm to a sea monster in particular, but in the released cut he tells Alberto and Luca that one-armed "is how I came into this world". Massimo would have grown up with a risk of being bullied or ostracised for his disability, which may also be why he's introverted and physically brawny (having been under more pressure to prove himself). More than most people at Porto Rosso, he would know what it's like to be judged by your appearance first.

Fridge Logic

• While it was a clever work-around for Luca to use the diving suit to satisfy the "swimming" portion of the Portorosso Cup challenge, since the suit had no air hose, it's odd that no one questions how long Luca was underwater without ever surfacing.
  • This is dealt with in the novelization where the judges are about to send someone to fetch him when the adults start to worry that Luca has been underwater for too long, but Luca emerges just in time before they could.

Fridge Horror

• During Uncle Ugo's visit, he briefly blacks out and Luca punches his heart to revive him. Then he says there is too much oxygen where they live. In reality, deep-sea animals are built to withstand the extremely high pressures of their environment, which means being in lower levels of pressure causes their bodies to malfunction and subsequently kills them. If being in shallower water is enough to put Ugo into paralysis, then one could only imagine how he'd fare on the surface.
• Ugo is Lorenzo's brother yet they look radically different. This suggests that the mer-folk can change and adapt to their sea environment just as they change and adapt to the surface environment. The bottom of the ocean has significantly less oxygen and way more pressure than where Luca and his family live. One does not envy the discomfort, if not outright pain, Luca would be forced to undergo as he changes in order to live with Ugo down in the deep. Given what we see of Ugo's difficulties with coming into the shallows, one does not envy what it would be like for Luca coming back.
• Uncle Ugo lives in The Deep, which he cheerful describes as an extremely isolated sensory vacuum with nothing to do, nothing to see, and (in the stinger) nothing to hear but his own thoughts. Uncle Ugo also isn't the most stable or functional person, suffering health problems upon returning to see the rest of his family and not at all noticing his description of his living conditions in the Deep are scaring his nephew. Also, he doesn't seem to realize in the stinger that he's talking to a goatfish, not Luca. Sensory deprivation, at least in humans, is known to cause mental instability and hallucinations after only hours and can permanently traumatize and damage the mind if suffered long-term. It's literally considered torture. And while the Paguros aren't human, Uncle Ugo certainly lines up with the idea that the Deep isn't exactly... healthy for the mind—and he's an adult. If Daniela had succeeded in forcing Luca, a developing twelve-year-old-child, to go to The Deep, even for "a season, two, want to make it three?"... what condition would he be in when he came back?
• "Bruno" seems to have been someone Alberto knew personally. The way Alberto described Bruno is very specific, especially given Alberto's behavior. It seems that might have been a former friend or even his father. However, Word of God says that, while early drafts did consider Bruno as his father's name, it didn't come to pass and the "voice of Bruno" was just that voice inside all of us that makes us doubt or second-guess ourselves.
• Daniela and Lorenzo try to find Luca by splashing everyone they suspect is him with water. They probably Didn't Think This Through because if they actually succeeded, Luca would end up exposed in front of everyone.
• Even though Ercole was probably just trying to give the protagonists a scare, him trying to ram his boat could've killed them, or at the very least, give them some serious injuries and put them in the ER. In Real Life, boating accidents have killed plenty of people via the debris getting jammed into their bodies, or just by the sheer blunt force.
  • Even worse, we learn in the novelization that Ercole can't swim, meaning that Ercole isn't going through Sanity Slippage when he attacks Luca and Alberto in the climax; Ercole was already crazy, as proven by the fact that he made the impulsive decision long before that to involve himself in a potentially serious boat crash even though he himself can't swim, solely in the hopes of spiting that kid who insulted his mustache. The sheer lunacy of this gives clear precedent to his Ax-Crazy behavior later.
  • This also sheds some light on why exactly the kids in Portorosso are all intimidated by Ercole. At first, he seems to be a Jerkass who is so pathetic that he races against children far younger than him, but is otherwise harmless and kind of lame. However, considering his willingness to corner and beat up Alberto when he and Luca are alone, ram his boat into theirs, and to even try to kill them despite knowing them in their human form for so long, it almost makes you wonder what else Ercole has done over the years to keep winning the races, especially to kids he sees as threats to his record. No wonder Giulia hates him, he's not just a jerk, but a potential danger to the kids of Portorosso, and she's likely witnessed some of it! "Evil empire of injustice," indeed.
• If Giulia was too late to save Luca and Alberto, Ercole would have succeeded in killing them. Imagine the reaction of Giulia, her father and Luca’s family to the news about Luca and Alberto being harpooned to death. Giulia takes a considerable risk when she rams her bike against Ercole's causing both of them to fall. They are speeding downhill at great speed and we see a bike wheel fly off and Giulia take a nasty tumble. Add in that Ercole is holding an exposed harpoon and it is very fortunate neither was seriously injured or killed in the crash.
• During the credits, it is shown that Luca exposed himself to his classmates by placing his hand in a fishbowl and Giulia's mother for a portrait by being dunked in water. Let's hope he made right choices unless he wants to find himself on a dissection table...
• Judging by the number of marks on his wall, by the time Luca and Alberto meet, Alberto’s father has left him alone for over a year. At the very least (As Alberto claims to have lost count of the days, meaning it very well could have been longer).
• Right before the climactic scene where Alberto reveals his sea monster form, he and Luca have their first actual fight after becoming frustrated by their clashing dreams. It's somewhat Played for Laughs, but as it goes on, it becomes more serious until Alberto pins Luca down and raises a fist to actually punch him, and only stops when Giulia walks in. What if she hadn't shown up at that moment, and Alberto had managed to punch Luca in the face, or if the fight had escalated further without Giulia to step in, resulting in either of the boys becoming seriously harmed? And how bad would either of them feel after harming their friend in a moment of anger?

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