Pixar has announced Gatto, its first fully hand-painted animated feature film. The film abandons the studio's characteristic CGI style to tell the story of Nero, a cat who gets into debt with a feline mafia boss in canal-side Venice. A welcome change of direction, as while other studios have adopted hand-drawn animation, Pixar rarely strays so far from its three-dimensional aesthetic.
The technical challenge of animating Venice with brushstrokes 🎨
To achieve this aesthetic shift, Pixar has developed a new rendering system that simulates watercolor and ink strokes on paper. Each frame is composed of digitally applied layers of color, mimicking the texture of real paint on canvas. The animation team has studied the technique of the great Venetian masters to capture the light on the water and the shadows of the bridges. The result is a film that retains Pixar's narrative fluidity but with a visual texture completely different from anything before.
Nero, the cat who borrowed from the wrong gangster 🐱
The plot follows Nero, a feline with more tricks than successes who decides to take out a loan from the local cat mafia boss. When he can't pay, he discovers that in Venice, interest is collected in cans of tuna and stolen naps. Best of all, the mafia boss is a mustachioed Persian cat who speaks with an Italian accent and demands bribes in the form of kibble. Pixar finally proves it knows how to make people laugh without needing a single rendered pixel.