Why Gatto feels like Pixar’s boldest creative bet since Coco

Some films aim to entertain. Others dare to reframe the studio itself. Gatto feels like that second kind. More than a new project, it signals a shift in voice. For Pixar, a company that once rewrote the rules of animation with every release, boldness has come in quieter doses in recent years. Yet here comes a painted cat in a waterlogged city, whispering something different. There’s no franchise, no returning character, no road trip. Just a black cat with a debt, a violinist with no stage, and a version of Venice blurred like a dream.

If Coco marked a turning point, the moment Pixar embraced culture, music, and emotion beyond the borders of American suburbia, then Gatto may be the next great leap. This time, the journey leads not to the Land of the Dead, but to the narrow alleys of Italy. Not through portals, but through puddles. Not through fireworks, but through brushstrokes.

The risk Pixar needed to take

In recent years, Pixar has felt caught between worlds. With legacy sequels like Lightyear and experiments like Elemental, the studio has struggled to recapture the impact of its early catalogue. The emotional ambition remained, but the edges softened. Even when films like Soul pushed the envelope in terms of visual language, the stories circled familiar themes: belonging, identity, redemption, often framed within neatly resolved arcs.

Gatto arrives with a different energy. It seems uninterested in easy answers, loud emotions, or characters explaining their growth out loud. The decision to center a black cat drifting through Venice, entangled in music, debt, and mood, signals a departure not just in tone, but in intent. The film leans away from universality and toward specificity, trusting atmosphere over exposition and texture over clarity.

While Gatto was only recently revealed to audiences, its development predates the 2025 Oscar win for Flow, the wordless drama about a cat navigating a flooded world. Though both films place felines at the center of silent, lyrical journeys, Gatto was already in motion, already choosing brushstrokes over blueprints, already listening instead of declaring. If anything, Flow’s historic win may signal that audiences are ready for what Pixar began crafting years ago.

Painting as defiance

Pixar has always innovated through technology, from the precision of Toy Story to the layered abstraction of Inside Out. But Gatto turns the brush the other way. Its choice to mimic hand-painted textures, to blur the sharp edges of digital perfection, feels less like a technical upgrade and more like an act of defiance. The studio isn’t chasing realism anymore. It’s chasing feeling.

The result is a visual world shaped by mess, shadow, and motion. Venice becomes a space of reflection, both literal and emotional, where light bleeds, water flickers, and nothing holds still long enough to harden. The painted aesthetic carries the emotional core of the film.

Nero's uncertainty, Maya's fractured music, and the city's shifting moods flow through this fluid visual grammar. The art breathes emotion into the frame and dissolves the boundaries between style and substance.

In a market saturated with algorithm-friendly brightness and clean lines, Gatto is offering something wilder, more fragile, more human. It invites the viewer to slow down, to follow texture the way one follows memory. Not for clarity, but for resonance.

From Santa Cecilia to Venice

When Coco premiered in 2017, it marked a turning point for Pixar. For the first time, the studio placed a non-American culture at the heart of its storytelling, weaving Mexican traditions, language, and music into every frame. It wasn’t just about representation. It was about building a world with roots. That same ambition hums beneath Gatto.

Director Enrico Casarosa returns to Italy not with nostalgia, but with intimacy. After Luca’s sunlit simplicity, Gatto trades seaside joy for something more complex, a Venice of debts and shadows, music and myth. The setting isn’t a backdrop. It’s a character with tides and ghosts, layered in centuries of art, loss, and survival. Casarosa’s connection to the country gives the film a texture that feels personal without becoming precious.

And just like Coco, Gatto uses music as more than ornament. Maya’s violin, like Miguel’s guitar, becomes a vessel for longing, memory, and connection. But where Coco bursts into song and color, Gatto hushes the room. It seeks resonance through restraint.

Gatto: Betting on resonance, not replication

While Gatto may not come wrapped in sequel hooks or merchandising strategies, its reach feels global from the start. In 2025, Flow became the first non-English animated film to win Best Picture, a wordless, feline-led vision that shifted industry thinking. It proved that atmosphere, tone, and visual boldness could speak louder than dialogue or IP.

Much like Coco, Gatto was already taking shape before another culturally rich animated film began to draw comparisons. When Pixar introduced Coco, talk immediately turned to The Book of Life, Guillermo del Toro’s earlier journey through Día de los Muertos. But Coco had its own rhythm, its own emotional logic, and that clarity led it to both critical and commercial success.

Gatto walks a similar path. It moves with intention, not imitation. And in a landscape saturated with repetition, its quiet confidence may turn out to be its loudest message.

A lineage of painted worlds

The visual ambition of Gatto follows a thread that winds through some of animation’s most daring experiments. It stands on the shoulders of works that dared to treat animation as pigment, not pipeline. In 2017, Loving Vincent stunned audiences by animating every frame as an oil painting, each one hand-rendered in the style of Van Gogh. Though its story remained traditional, the technique opened a door: animation didn’t have to hide the hand behind the stroke.

Years later, Arcane entered the space with a different proposition. With its textured blend of illustration, digital painting, and high-end CG, the series proved that hybrid styles can command emotional depth, cinematic language, and global appeal. Crucially, Arcane showed what happens when a painted aesthetic meets serious investment and narrative weight.

Gatto moves in that same direction, but with a softness all its own. The film embraces a painterly approach that incorporates 2D hand-painted textures and shaders, allowing surfaces to shimmer, erode, and breathe. The result is a visual world shaped by mess, shadow, and motion. Venice sways, blurs, and spills to immerse instead of impressing.

That porous aesthetic feels even bolder when placed next to Pixar’s upcoming Toy Story 5, a return to clean, polished CGI and franchise familiarity. Where Woody and Buzz will glide through hyper-smooth plastic, Gatto lets every frame reveal the grain of brush hairs. And in a year where The Wild Robot has already drawn praise for its tactile blend of nature and metal, Gatto joins a growing wave of animated films that reject visual sterility in favor of style that stains.

In doing so, it reframes what Pixar’s rendering legacy can become: not cleaner, but deeper.

In cats we trust

A black cat, in a city of shadows and strings. It almost feels too perfect. But Gatto plays with charm differently. Nero, with his twitching ears and tangled debts, enters a long tradition of cats as narrative anchors. Elusive, expressive, ungovernable. From fairy tales to TikTok, cats have long ruled both myth and meme. Their mystery isn’t a barrier to connection. It’s the very source of it.

Choosing a cat as the heart of a film about uncertainty and rhythm isn’t simply cute. It’s honest. Cats don’t explain. They perform, they vanish, they reappear when it matters. And in a visual landscape shaped by intuition, Gatto trusts that instinct is enough. It doesn’t reach for universality through clarity. It invites intimacy through motion.

Sometimes, the most human stories come with whiskers.