La luna (2012)

La Luna is a wordless Pixar short from 2011, directed by Enrico Casarosa, in which three generations of Italian men row out to sea, climb a ladder to the moon, and sweep fallen stars into a crescent. It is loosely based on Italo Calvino, which is the most intellectually ambitious thing about it. The film is charming, gentle, and entirely devoid of the cultural signifiers that occupy our current discourse.

We look for a diversity agenda and find an Italian family cast for cultural specificity. We look for a feminist critique and find a patriarchal tradition treated as a charming inheritance. The boy's independence is expressed by turning his cap backward, not by dismantling the gender binary. There is no racial commentary, no climate allegory (the moon is not a stand-in for carbon emissions), no economic critique (the family's labor is whimsical, not exploited), no body image themes, no neurodivergent characters, no historical revisionism. The film is nearly wordless and delivers no lecture. It is, in short, a film about sweeping.

This is not a failure. It is simply a film from a different era, or perhaps from no era at all, content to be a fable about a boy and his brooms. The cultural awareness on display is the awareness that a star is heavy and a rake is useful. We award it nothing on any of our ten markers, not out of hostility, but out of precision. It is a zero. A clean, lunar zero. And there is something almost restful about that.