Gatto

[bulgaross]

Gatto's teaser (while simple and short) has wit, charm and intrigue... unlike the generic mess that is the trailer of Hexed.
Disney Animation is clearly going through an identity crisis, running solely on fumes (endless sequels).

[Jules]

But it’s been going through an identity crisis at least since Raya, in my opinion.

I wish I was CCO there. My first mandate would be for all filmmakers to forget what a Disney animated film is and just pitch their most original, creative, wildest ideas, without exceeding a PG-13 rating. I would also champion projects that tackle different filmmaking genres. You can have biographies, dramas, noirs, action, thriller … and still keep within a PG-13 rating that doesn’t stretch the Disney brand to breaking point.

And considering the profits the company makes, I think a hand-drawn film every five years or so won’t break the bank, and should be made if only for legacy purposes. It can be presented as a prestige production, and not one seeking blockbuster returns. That might mean lower budgets, but will also free the filmmakers to tackle ideas that are considered too risky for a $150 million Zootopia-scale film.

[bulgaross]

Oh, absolutely! They are so lucky to have two monster franchises, such as Frozen and Zootopia, to keep them at least financially afloat. Creatively, not so much.

[blackcauldron85]

I saw TS5 yesterday in 3D; the Gatto teaser looked absolutely stunning in 3D.

[bulgaross]

new info from the Annecy presentation:

Prior to the Loving Dory first reveal, Enrico Casarosa gave an update on his upcoming original film Gatto revolving around a cat living in the iconic lagoon city of Venice which was first announced in Annecy last year.

Key voice cast Mark Ruffalo and Laurence Fishburne has since recently been announced. Ruffalo plays protagonist Nero, a black cat who is Indebted to feline mob boss Rocco, voiced by Fishburne.

Casarosa revealed more of the storylines for the feature as well as characters, Saverio, a slapstick pigeon, and Maja, a talented violinist who busks on the streets of Venice.

Nero and Maja are brought together when Rocco sets Nero the challenge of stealing Maja’s violin to clear his debt and be free forever from the mob boss’s control.

In other reveals, Casarosa announced he will be voicing the character of Saverio.

Casarosa said he and the animation team had walked around Venice and taken inspiration from the depiction of the city by artists such as Tintoretto, John Singer Sargent and Claude Monet for the look aesthetic of the backdrops in Gatto.

“It’s very coarse, sketched and painterly and textured,” he said.

Casarosa told Annecy that he and his team had just passed the milestone mark of completing 50% of the animation.

https://deadline.com/2026/06/pixar-thea ... 236968179/

[Sotiris]

In Disney and Pixar’s Gatto, the scrappy black cat Nero (voiced by Mark Ruffalo) begins to question whether he’s lived the right lives after years of maneuvering the canal-ridden, superstitious city of Venice, Italy. Indebted to Rocco (voiced by Laurence Fishburne), the ruthless 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.

Source: https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/a ... uncements/

Gatto trades the Ligurian coast for the canals of Venice, where, Casarosa explained, the streets were once ruled by cats. Having spent summers there, he became fascinated by their secret world of who they waited on for scraps, how they seemed to run the place. That fascination became the movie. He also teased a new, deliberately painterly visual style, describing the goal as the feeling of "walking into a painting," before promising to explain how they pulled it off later in the talk.

At the center of Gatto is Nero, a black street cat (voiced by Mark Ruffalo) who's had a hard go of it. Feared as bad luck in a deeply superstitious city, and, inconveniently for Venice, unable to swim. As a kitten, he's taken in by Rocco (Laurence Fishburne), the British Shorthair crime boss who rules the city's felines like a mob don, commanding a colorful crew of hench cats, one of whom, Casarosa showed in a slide, bears a striking resemblance to Machiavelli from Luca. A board sequence of Nero arriving at the gang's hideout drew one of the panel's biggest laughs, as the cats' "password" exchange devolves into authentic-sounding feline grumbling.

Rocco, it turns out, is an obsessive collector of fine cat art, and he's set his sights on a centerpiece: a rare violin carved with a cat-shaped head. The problem for Nero is timing; he's reached an existential crisis, weary of the thieving life and desperate to get out. Rocco offers him a way: one last job. Steal the violin, and Nero earns his freedom.

The violin belongs to Maya, a gifted young street musician and, like Nero, an outsider trying to make it in Venice. To get to her, Nero enlists Saverio Piccionini, a Venetian pigeon who owes Nero his life and happens to be a passionate union organizer for the city's pigeons. In the first sequence shown, Saverio leads a protest against the anti-roosting spikes lining Venice's stoops before peeling off to help, leaving a one-eyed pigeon named Catalina in charge of the picket line. Casarosa revealed he's voicing Saverio himself.

The heist immediately goes sideways. Maya, unlike nearly everyone around her, isn't superstitious and isn't afraid of Nero, but the persistent, deeply superstitious cops hounding her are. In a clip set moments later, she realizes she can wield the black cat to scare off Capitano Briganti, and decides to keep Nero as a pet. He has other ideas, faking the role of a sweet house cat while he hunts for his opening, until her superstitious father refuses to let the cat stay, and a caught-in-the-act escape attempt instead sparks the start of an unlikely friendship.

That friendship is the heart of the film. Nero, it turns out, has music in his bones (his tail dances helplessly whenever he hears it) and the two discover how much they share. In one of the finished scenes, Maya takes him on a canal-boat ride, drifting under a bridge in the rain outside the opera house to listen, and confides her dream of one day performing inside. As Casarosa frames it, these are two black cats in the world, one literal and one figurative, and Nero faces a real choice: steal the violin and betray her, or risk everything and defy Rocco.

Casarosa devoted the back half of the presentation to Gatto's style, which draws on the Venice of classic artists Tintoretto, John Singer Sargent, and Claude Monet to build an expressive, immersive city. Line work is applied wherever possible and is fully controllable by the animators. Nero's eyebrows are etched in by hand, his fur rebuilt to read as drawn strokes, and Saverio's wings designed to look like brushwork. For fast, cartoony beats, animators reach for multi-limbs, a nod to classic hand-drawn technique. Environments and props get 3D lines drawn over them as well; in a comp comparison, Casarosa toggles the rendered image off to reveal the linework alone, a black field of hand-drawn strokes that conceptually echoes the ink-line-over-paint approach Disney pioneered in 101 Dalmatians. Reflections aren't mirrored from the actual scene but rebuilt as simpler, watercolor-like brushstrokes, and the atmospheric haze is hand-scribbled fog the team affectionately calls "Scrog." As of the day before the panel, Gatto officially crossed the 50% mark of completed animation, halfway to its March 5th, 2027 release date.

Source: https://www.laughingplace.com/disney-en ... necy-2026/

[PatchofBlue]

It's great to have more specific description of this new animation style.

The story details excite me also. The genre-blending wasn't readily obvious to me when this movie was pitched, but I'm loving this "gangster-style" film centered on this feline underworld.

I have a feeling that at some point, Nero is going to tumble into the canals, and Maya is going to save him. That's going to be either the thing that starts their relationship, or like some 3rd act escalation.

[Mooky]

I liked this movie better when it was set in NYC and called Oliver & Company.

[Disney Duster]

^ Oh, you!

I think I will like Gatto more, but we have to wait and see.