Last year, Gints Zilbalodis' Flow, a Latvian cat animation created entirely in free open-source program Blender, beat both Pixar and Dreamworks at t
Last year, Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, a Latvian cat animation created entirely in free open-source program Blender, beat both Pixar and Dreamworks at the Oscars. Now, the Luxo Lamp lot over at Disney are looking to strike back with their own black cat tale, Gatto, the latest movie from Luca director Enrico Casarosa. Blending a Pixar-first hand-painted animation style with a curiosity piquing tale of mobster cats in Venice, the movie — which we now know will feature the vocal stylings of Mark Ruffalo and Laurence Fishburne as scrappy black cat Nero and feline mob boss Rocco, respectively — sounds like it could be a winner. And if the newly dropped first teaser is anything to go by, it looks like one, too. Check it out below;
The Godfather theme. Cattified Ruffalo and Fishburne interrogating another alley puss over some missing tuna. All three feline folks getting hilariously distracted by the lightbulb hanging above them. Sure, this is about as ‘teaser’ as a teaser trailer gets, giving nothing of the bigger plot of Gatto away, but as a proof of concept — and a demonstration of the bold 2D-CG hybridised art style being deployed on Pixar’s latest original movie — this is compelling, beautifully stylised stuff. And Fishburne and Ruffalo just sound exactly how you’d want a couple of mobster cats to sound, don’t they?
The official synopsis for Gatto reads: “After years of manoeuvring the canal-ridden, superstitious city of Venice, Italy, Nero (Mark Ruffalo) begins to question whether he’s lived the right lives. Indebted to Rocco (Laurence Fishburne), the local feline mob boss, Nero finds himself in a quandary and is forced to forge a truly unexpected friendship that may finally lead him to his purpose—unless Venice gets the better of him first.””
With Pixar having previously teased a significant musical component to Gatto at last year’s Annecy showcase (apparently Nero’s tail is a massive fan of jazz — make of that what you will), it looks like Enrico Casarosa and co are playing their cards close to their chest for the time being, teasing just whiskers of what Gatto has in store as they go. We look forward to finding out whether Gatto is ready to make us an animated offer we can’t refuse when Pixar’s latest original offering hits cinemas on 5 March, 2027.
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