Pixar Animation Studios is making a splash with its teaser trailer for the upcoming film Gatto. Directed by Luca‘s Enrico Casarosa, the new movie follows a black cat named Nero, who becomes entangled with the cat mafia in Venice, Italy, and is unwillingly adopted by a street artist named Maya. It also features a new art style, breaking with Pixar’s tradition of over three decades.
While Pixar started out as a trendsetter for computer animation, the studio has been struggling at the box office for the past few years. Even with Hoppers being well-received and early reviews for Toy Story 5 being highly positive, the company is perhaps overdue for a good shake-up. Gatto seems poised to do just that, bringing an end to an era for Pixar.
Pixar Pioneered Computer Animation
As the studio behind Toy Story, the first-ever feature-length fully computer-animated film, Pixar holds a special place in the world of animation. Its name became practically synonymous with the medium, and it quickly established itself as a pioneer in computer animation with a string of early hits. The studio also set the artistic standards for the medium with its art direction.
Many have described Pixar’s art style as photorealistic due to its lifelike qualities. Although its character designs have varied greatly, ranging from toys to animals to humans and more, the way that they move is generally fluid and realistic. As technology has advanced, so have these aspects of the animation. Most Pixar films also feature beautiful, highly detailed backgrounds that could almost be mistaken for live-action.
When other animation studios began embracing CGI, many of them also adopted Pixar’s photorealistic art style. This demonstrated just how influential the studio was in shaping computer animation into the art form that fans know and love today. However, this style has fallen out of fashion in recent years, prompting the computer animation pioneer to reevaluate its tried-and-true methods.
A New Style Has Taken the Computer Animation World by Storm
In 2018, Sony Pictures Animation released Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It won over plenty of fans with its unique blend of art styles, utilizing alternative techniques to make the film look like a comic book brought to life. This kick-started a new trend of making 3D animation look more like 2D art, which stood in stark contrast to Pixar’s photorealism.
Several popular animated movies in recent years have adopted a similar animation style, including Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and KPop Demon Hunters. Fans love the combination of 2D and 3D, finding it more stylized and visually interesting than Pixar’s signature look. Although Pixar initially stuck with its usual techniques, the studio is finally turning over a new leaf with Gatto.
This technically isn’t the first time that Pixar has experimented with combining 2D and 3D animation. The studio has been more experimental with its short films, such as “Day & Night,” and even used traditional 2D animation in some of its SparkShorts series installments. That said, Gatto will be its first feature-length film to employ a different animation style, which is already more aligned with Into the Spider-Verse than its usual efforts.
Gatto Will Open a New Era for Pixar
While fans at the Annecy Animation Festival got their first look at Gatto a year ago, the rest of the world finally got to see Pixar’s new animation style in the teaser trailer. The one-minute clip shows Nero and cat mob boss Rocco interrogating another feline when they get distracted by an overhanging lightbulb and pull chain. Despite its brevity, Pixar fans are already ecstatic about the change.
As great as Pixar’s signature style is, especially after years of honing, audiences have begun to feel like the studio’s movies all look too similar. Some viewers have also heavily criticized its characters’ cartoonish, “bean mouth” aesthetic in recent years, which they find off-putting. Part of the reason that Spider-Verse was so revolutionary was that it looked so different from what viewers were used to seeing, and Pixar clearly took note.
Gatto‘s painting-like quality is on full display in the trailer, and it feels quite refreshing. The glimpse viewers get of the nighttime Venice skyline looks unlike anything the studio has produced before. More importantly, despite taking its cues from Spider-Verse‘s animation style, it doesn’t feel like a mere copy. Instead, it looks like a true fusion of styles, combining Pixar’s usual fluidity with a completely new aesthetic.
Its release date is still many months away, and audiences have yet to see what the humans of Gatto will look like. Nevertheless, fans couldn’t be more thrilled by what they’ve seen so far. After years of perfecting the same animation style it’s had since the beginning, Pixar is proving that it can still shake up the industry. Here’s hoping that Gatto is just the start of a new era of innovation at Pixar.
Gatto arrives in theaters on March 5, 2027.
- Release Date
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March 5, 2027
- Director
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Enrico Casarosa
- Producers
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Andrea Warren
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Mark Ruffalo
Nero (voice)
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