Luca is the 24th collaboration between Pixar and Disney. For a long time, my only knowledge of the film was a couple of cheap McDonald's Happy Meal toys that my children adored for about two hours before tossing aside and forgetting ... but they'd seen a trailer for the movie and have been wanting to see it. We finally queued it up on Disney+ and settled in for another installment from the team that brought us so many good animated movies in recent years.

It was ... fine.

I don't have a lot of specific complaints about the movie, but I'm used to more substance from the Disney/Pixar team. Luca, however, is sweet but unsatisfying -- little more than colorful fluff with an occasional laugh.

The story involves two shapeshifting Italian sea monsters who dream of living up where the people are, and a highly competitive triathlon involving swimming, pasta and bicycles. There's a girl who needs friends, and a "villain" who'll stop at nothing to win the race.

Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) are the young friends who step onto dry land and transform into boys -- and who, unfortunately for their anonymity, change back to their fishy form whenever they touch water. They obsess over owning a Vespa. Giulia (Emma Berman) is the girl who befriends them. Luca's fearful parents (Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan) are understandably concerned and go on a wacky search through the village for their missing son.

Luca is a literal "fish out of water" story and it has a good message at its heart about acceptance -- for instance, Giulia's father Massimo (Marco Barricelli) notes that it was a birth defect, not a sea monster, that left him with only one arm, but the movie never dwells on his deformity nor does it ever make him seem even slightly disabled or pitiable because of it. It's a nice touch.

The movie is fun. It's cute. It's quite colorful. My 8-year-old kids enjoyed it from beginning to end but, unlike some other animated movies we've watched recently -- Encanto, Princess Mononoke and Raya & the Last Dragon, among others -- they haven't shown any interest in seeing Luca a second time.