Gatto, Pixar’s next big swing is a painted journey through Venice

There’s a gatto tiptoeing through Venetian watercolors. His name is Nero, and his world flows in brushstrokes, textured, humming, alive. The canals shimmer beneath him like stretched silk, and every rooftop seems dipped in twilight.

In Pixar’s next big swing, Gatto, animation becomes evocation: a city that floats and flickers like a candle’s last dance, where color seeps into cobblestones and shadows hum with jazz.

Directed by Luca’s Enrico Casarosa, Gatto is a painted voyage of superstition and sound, a story where fur bristles under moonlight and alleyways echo with meows and mandolins. It’s a tale that drifts, coils, and curls, like smoke rising from a gondolier’s song.

Far from the geometric polish of past Pixar hits, this film welcomes porosity, softness at the edges, a willingness to let silence breathe. With each frame, the studio reaches for brushstrokes that blur and run and make the canvas sing.

A painted promise from familiar hands

Behind Gatto is a reunion of brush and soul. Director Enrico Casarosa, who last took us to the sun-soaked Ligurian coast in Luca, returns to his native Italy with a palette more daring and introspective. Where Luca glowed with innocence and friendship, Gatto leans into mystery and music, bringing Venice to life with smoky shadows and color that bleeds like ink on damp paper (instead of storybook brightness).

Casarosa reunites with producer Andrea Warren, known for Luca and Lava, forming a duo deeply attuned to emotional storytelling through environment. Their fingerprints are unmistakable, gentle, sincere, romantic without excess. Together, they invite Pixar into riskier territory, abandoning glossy surfaces in favor of textured ambition.

The film is currently in development and scheduled for a summer 2027 release, likely aiming for the studio’s usual June slot. No teaser has been released yet, but concept art shown during Disney’s 2025 investor showcase revealed narrow bridges, leaning buildings, and a feline silhouette poised on a glowing lamppost. The message was clear: Gatto will be unlike anything Pixar has done before.

Nero, the cat who owes a debt to the night

At the heart of Gatto is Nero, a black cat with a jazz soul and a streak of superstition. He moves like smoke and thinks in syncopation. Far from the bright-eyed heroes of other Pixar tales, Nero follows his own rhythm. Survival guides his steps, not hope. Deep in debt to a shadowy feline mafia, he spends his nine lives slipping through the cracks of Venice, dodging danger with a flick of his tail and a melody stuck in his fur.

The city wraps around him like a second skin. Every corner holds a secret, every rooftop listens. One night, under a bridge soaked in moonlight, Nero crosses paths with Maya, a street musician with a violin case full of broken strings and a voice that quiets the world. Their connection comes tangled and tentative, stitched together by hunger, half-truths, and the ache of something more.

They move together through shifting waters and stone, chased by enemies and melodies alike. Nero looks for an exit, Maya reaches for a stage, and Venice clings to its silence. The story dances forward like a jazz improvisation, where rhythm matters more than rule, and every step could be a misstep or a miracle.

A city painted, a cat in motion

Gatto is composed like a painting, its bones made of color and its breath drawn in washes of light. It’s a leap into the tactile, where image becomes sensation and every scene begins with a gesture, not a grid. Pixar reaches for a new language of motion, one spoken in texture and time.

Early concept art reveals alleyways blurred at the edges, bridges that melt into canals, and Nero himself rendered with a softness that evokes fur, not pixels. The studio has described the style as an evolution, part impressionist, part theatrical, always in flux. It draws from the lyricism of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the romantic haze of Disney’s Wish, and the painterly gravity of Arcane, where every color seems soaked in emotion.

Yet Gatto reaches for translucence. Its palette flows like light through stained glass, fractured, luminous, and full of pause. There’s space between the lines, breath between the notes. In a city famous for echo, the film leans into quiet not as absence, but as presence. Every brushstroke hides a secret, every blur a choice.

A swing against certainty

After decades of clean arcs and moral clarity, Gatto feels like a pivot toward something less contained. For Pixar, a studio long praised for its narrative precision and visual polish, this film marks a rare embrace of ambiguity. The choice of a cat as protagonist already signals slipperiness. Nero navigates instinct, improvises survival, and moves through the world with rhythm instead of direction.

This shift mirrors a broader reckoning. In recent years, Pixar has faced questions about identity, audience, and innovation. Films like Elemental and Lightyear struggled to resonate, caught between legacy and reinvention. Meanwhile, the animation world kept evolving.

Flow, a wordless European short about a solitary cat adrift in a flooded world, took home the Oscar in early 2025. Though Gatto was already in development well before Flow’s win, the timing now feels charged, as if the world is finally leaning into feline metaphors, ambiguity, and emotion without dialogue.

Gatto embraces dissonance. Rather than echoing past triumphs or chasing old formulas, it drifts into new territory, where meaning dissolves and mood takes over. Instead of offering universal morals or hero’s journeys, it paints a corner of the world in silence, shadow, and sensation.

The music behind the fur

In Gatto, music moves through every alley and puddle like a second heartbeat. From the earliest descriptions of Nero as a jazz-obsessed stray to the fragile melodies carried in Maya’s violin case, sound rises as the film’s hidden architecture. Jazz shapes the narrative with rhythm, silence, and surprise. And just like the visuals, the music bends edges, leans into dissonance, and lets emotion take the lead.

Director Enrico Casarosa has a history of weaving score into emotion. In Luca, Dan Romer’s music wrapped the Ligurian coast in nostalgia and wonder without ever overwhelming it. If Gatto follows that path, we can expect a soundtrack that breathes with the characters, perhaps even a score that slips between diegetic and ambient, as Maya plays, Nero listens, and Venice echoes back.

Though no composer has been officially announced, the emphasis on musicality throughout early reports suggests that sound will shape the film as profoundly as image. Whether Maya sings, whispers, or simply draws bow across string, her presence may offer the only voice in a film that, so far, promises silence. The result could be something close to a musical without ever becoming one, a story that sings but never shouts.

What’s still in the shadows about Gatto

Despite the concept art and early buzz, much of Gatto remains cloaked in secrecy. No teaser has been released, no voice cast confirmed, and no composer named. Even Maya, central to the story’s emotional texture, exists only in sketches and brief descriptions. Her presence, like Nero’s path, is still forming in the fog.

This silence feels intentional. Pixar seems to be shaping Gatto with the same care and restraint as its visuals, letting the project breathe without rush or spotlight. Its style may resist loud trailers or viral moments. Instead, its strength could lie in stillness, in suggestion, in the quiet confidence of a film that waits to be felt rather than consumed.

That said, expectations run high. The painted aesthetic alone positions Gatto as a potential landmark in animation, much like Toy Story with CGI. If the film delivers on that ambition, it may open doors to a new phase in Pixar’s visual storytelling, one shaped more by sensation than certainty.

For now, all we know is this. A black cat is walking through a watercolor city, and the world is holding its breath.