Gatto is a huge departure for Pixar. It will be the first time in the Disney-owned studio's 40-year history that it has strayed from the 3D animation style that it popularised through franchises like Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Incredibles.
The concept art and early teasers revealed a painterly 2D style. Now Pixar's released a complete trailer, providing a deeper look at the new hybrid animation approach. And it's really got people talking
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The Gatto trailer reveals more details about the movie's premise. Nero is a Mark Ruffalo-voiced black cat who joins the mog mob in Venice. After losing eight of his nine lives, he reevaluates his place in the world and decides to make a fresh start with a street musician called Maja, played by Bianca Babaşa.
The trailer also allows us to see Pixar's hybrid animation style in action. As we already knew, this isn't traditional 2D work. Pixar's combining computer-generated animation with hand-painted 2D textures and shaders.
The environments, characters and sets are modeled and animated in 3D to retain spatial depth, dynamic lighting and camera movement. The studio then applies hand-drawn details and a flattened perspective layered onto the 3D models, somewhat like the approach Disney used in its 2012 short Paperman.
In the comments on YouTube, a lot of people are pleased to see that the movie looks like its concept art (unlike Disney's Hexed). The question is whether Pixar has managed to find the sweet spot at which its familiar 3D models and the stylised 2D art style gel.
For the most part, I think it does. There are moments where the trailer feels a little uncanny, like when the police appear towards the end, and this hybrid style doesn't entirely replicate the warmth of physical animation, but the environments look spectacular, and the flat perspective and visible brushwork give the movie an appealing storybook feel.
Some people were hoping for something even more stylised and feel that Pixar's heart isn't in this approach. There are suggestions that it's chasing a trend on the heels of Into the Spider-Verse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem without going all the way there.
But it might have taken many fans aback if Gatto had made such a radical departure. Sony Pictures Animation could make a movie like Into the Spider-Verse because it wasn't so synonymous with a particular house style. Pixar had to find its own sweet spot.
People are also seeing the influence of Oscar-winning Flow and DreamWorks' 2022 movie Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. That's fine; there's always room for more cats in animation. Maybe all of these films were inspirations, but the characters and story make Gatto still feel like a Pixar movie even if it looks very different, and that's something that's exciting to see.
Gatto will be released on 5 March 2027.
