“Per mille sardine!” Italian identity in the Pixar animated film Luca and in its Italian dubbed version

This paper investigates the construction of Italian identity in the film Luca (2021), focusing in particular on the use of language and on the strategies used in its Italian dubbed version. Luca is a film where the construction of Italian identity is undoubtedly extremely important, which has been achieved by exploiting various strategies, both narrative, visual, and verbal. The aim of the study was to focus in particular on the importance of language, as it turns out to be crucial for the identification of the characters as belonging to either the group of the sea monsters or the group of human beings. The sea monsters, in fact, speak a language variety identifiable as standard General American English, whereas the humans speak English with a thick Italian accent, and their variety is interspersed with Italian words/phrases and sometimes they also switch to Italian at the level of entire sentences. The analysis of the Italian dubbed version of the film has revealed that the Italian dubbing professionals have opted for a general strategy of neutralization, therefore erasing any trace of distinction between the variety spoken by the sea monsters and that spoken by the humans, as all characters speak standard Italian, with no accents or other distinctive features.