Disney has released the first full trailer for Pixar's Gatto, pulling back the curtain on the movie's unique premise and its gorgeous Venice setting.
This latest sneak peek establishes that Gatto's lead, Nero, discovers that, being a cat and all, he has nine lives. However, as they're lost one after the other, the feline is forced to contend with whether he's made the best use of all those (second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth) chances while dealing with the mobster who took him in as a kitten.
The animation style is a slight departure for Pixar, and it has a lot in common with 2021's Luca (no great surprise given that it's directed by the filmmakers behind that). The movie looks gorgeous, anyway, and all eyes will now be on whether the latest original from the acclaimed animation studio can find box office success and earn the same "classic" status as many of its predecessors.
In Gatto, after years of manoeuvring the canal-ridden, superstitious city of Venice, Italy, Nero begins to question whether he’s lived the right lives. Indebted to Rocco, the 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.
Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things, The Avengers, Spotlight, Foxcatcher) leads the voice cast as the scrappy black cat Nero, and Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix trilogy, Boyz n the Hood, What's Love Got to Do with It) will voice the ruthless mob boss cat, Rocco.
"First because it’s a great story, second it’s set in Venice, which is kind of like a living painting and we’re trying to bring that aesthetic to the look of the film so it’s not as photorealistic as historically our films have been," Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter previously said of Gatto.
He continued, "I do feel we’re at an interesting point in animation history where people look for something new and the challenge for our directors is for people to go, 'Whoa, I’ve never seen that,' and second, say, 'I understand that, and I recognise that as somehow being part of my own experience."
Gatto is directed by Enrico Casarosa and produced by Andrea Warren, who, as noted, are the filmmaking team behind the Oscar-nominated feature Luca. The movie releases exclusively in theaters on March 5, 2027.