At last year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Pixar chief Pete Docter announced “Gatto,” an original film from Enrico Casarosa, who made “Luca” and one of the studio’s all-time great shorts “La Luna.”
This year, Casarosa returned (in person) for the first time in 14 years to debut brand new footage from the movie, which hits theaters on March 5, 2027. And we must say the footage was the cat’s pajamas.
“Gatto,” Casarosa explained, was inspired by the sunken Italian city of Venice. There used to be tons of stray cats prowling the crisscrossing canals and corridors that make up the city. Casarosa wondered where they went and how they conducted their business. “What was their life like? They seemed to rule the place,” Casarosa said. He wanted to make a movie about “the secret world of Venice cats.” So he did.
The main character of “Gatto” is a black cat named Nero, voiced by Mark Ruffalo. “Everyone is superstitious and they think he’s bad luck,” Casarosa said of the main character. Nero is indebted to a local cat mob boss named Rocco (Lawrence Fishburne), who oversees a colorful group of hench-cats, who do Rocco’s bidding – primarily stealing artwork. But not just any artwork. No, it has to be cat artwork. Paintings, frescoes, statues of cats.
Nero becomes Rocco’s favorite thief because he’s able to sneak into places that other cats can’t, because people are superstitious and run away from him. But Nero wants to leave the criminal cat underworld. They have to make a deal for one last job, with Rocco tasking Nero to steal a violin with a cat-shaped head from Maya, a young street musician.
One bit of test animation showed Nero attempting to go to Rocco’s lair. A cat meets him at a door and asks Nero for the password. Nero meows in a really hilarious way. Also, Casarosa pointed out, these cats are “really into disco.”
A more fully animated scene showed Nero interacting with a union labor advocate pigeon named Saverio (voiced by Casarosa himself), with Saverio attempting to help Nero steal the violin. Of course it goes sideways almost immediately. Another clip, set directly after the first, shows Maya capturing Nero in a box. She takes him home and he is fussy, eventually getting out of the box and nearly getting the violin out the window, before he decides to play cute and pretend to be a housecat. He’s got to get closer to the violin and needs more time.
The third – and by far most beautiful – clip of the three showed Maya taking Nero on a gondola. He seems nervous about the water (hey, cats only have so many lives) but found himself enraptured by a nearby opera. Maya and Nero sit in the boat, listening, watching the reflections from the opera house dance in the canal water below. It is really stunning and so sweet.
This scene, Casarosa said, was “the heart of the movie.” The two characters are “like two black cats.” And the central conflict hinges on an essential question – “Will he steal the violin or risk his life to defy Rocco?”
After showing off the footage, Casarosa talked about the technical and artistic side of “Gatto.” He described “Gatto” as carrying “an immersive, expressive painterly look.” And he’s right. The movie looks unlike any other Pixar movie and any other animated movie, really. Each environment and character is made up of brush strokes, with strong linework and a commitment to emulating the human hand of the artists behind “Gatto.”
Casarosa explained how they made the movie feel so unique, with a combination of linework, what he called “multiple limbs” when the cat is in motion, smears between motions and reflections in the water, which evoke watercolor and simpler brushstrokes. Everywhere in “Gatto” there is atmosphere. You can sense the history of the city in every frame.
About 50% of “Gatto,” Casarosa said, is in animation, meaning they have quite a long way to go before next spring. But they’ll get there, even if it uses up all of their nine lives.
To conclude, Casarosa said “Gatto” has “a lot of heart, a lot of humor and a lot of cats.”
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