Gatto

Vibe

Production notes

Gatto is Enrico Casarosa's second Pixar feature as director, after Luca (2021), reuniting him with producer Andrea Warren. The film returns to Italy — Casarosa's homeland — but trades the Riviera village setting of Luca for the canals of Venice, following a black cat named Nero indebted to a feline mob boss in a superstitious city that hates him. Pete Docter unveiled the project at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2025, showing pencil tests and animation samples that drew significant attention for their distinctive visual approach. The film is being developed in what has been described as a 'living painting' aesthetic — a hand-painted, illustrative look that blends traditional 2D textures with modern CGI rendering, deliberately departing from Pixar's typical photorealistic-to-stylized continuum. The film features music as a major thematic element. Casting has not been fully announced. Originally scheduled for June 18, 2027, the release was moved up to March 5, 2027 in December 2025 to avoid competing with Sony's Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse.

Trivia

• Gatto is Enrico Casarosa's second Pixar feature, returning him to Italian settings after Luca (2021) — but trading the Riviera coastal village of his childhood for the canals of Venice and a noir-inflected feline crime story.
• The film's 'living painting' visual approach — described by Pete Docter as a hand-painted, illustrative look that blends traditional 2D textures with modern CGI — was previewed at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2025 and drew significant industry attention as one of the most stylistically distinct projects in Pixar's recent pipeline.
• Gatto's release date was moved up from June 18, 2027 to March 5, 2027 in December 2025 to avoid direct competition with Sony Pictures Animation's Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse — the same protective release-window strategy that had unsuccessfully been attempted for Elio in 2025.
• The film is set in Venice, joining a small list of major Pixar features set primarily outside North America (Luca, Coco, Brave, Cars 2 sequences); it continues Casarosa's interest in Italian settings rooted in his upbringing.
• As Pixar's 32nd feature film, Gatto is among the studio's first wave of post-pandemic original projects to enter active production after the Elio failure prompted internal reassessment of the studio's original-feature strategy.

Legacy

Gatto represents one of the most-anticipated Pixar projects of the late 2020s — partly for Casarosa's previous work on Luca, partly for the film's distinctive 'living painting' visual approach that promises a stylistic departure from Pixar's typical aesthetic, and partly because it is among the studio's first wave of post-Elio original features and thus carries strategic weight beyond its specific narrative. The film's reception will substantially shape conversations about whether Pixar can profitably produce original (non-sequel) features in the post-pandemic theatrical environment, particularly after Hoppers's 2026 success suggested original animation could still find significant audiences. The Italian setting and music-driven thematic focus extend Casarosa's autobiographical interest in his homeland, while the noir crime structure and adult-coded mob storyline mark the film as one of Pixar's more genre-forward projects. Casting and full plot details remain to be announced as of mid-2026.