When it came to crafting the look of Luca, Casarosa deliberately veered away from photorealism.

The Pixar “style” has slowly evolved in tandem with computer animation?

But as Casarosa says, visuals are not necessarily what the studio has been known for, especially in the early days of computer graphics.

Because they were working with huge limitations on the computer side, the visual wasn’t immediately the thing that they were just completely blowing us away,” Casarosa admits.

So it’s not like we have to make a completely new tool.

It’s a little bit more: Oh, but can I actually not make it look realistic?”.

The result in Luca is water that doesn’t look like a photograph, but instead captures a rich blueness and warmth that evokes halcyon summertime days more distinctively

It’s an artistic choice that extends throughout the rest of the movie, one that the animators deliberately had to manipulate the tools in order to capture, and one that makes Luca a visual delight