Listen to Nick Cave Narrate Animated Short The Cat Piano

The YouTube piano cat meme is more than two years old. In other words, it's long overdue for a parody of its own. And the folks at the People's Republic of Animation are only to happy to give you something you probably never would have thought to ask for: an animated film-noir take on the piano cat, The Cat Piano, narrated by Aussie rocker/general badass, Nick Cave.

Cave's narration is actually a poem written by Eddie White for the short film, that opens like so:

Long ago my city's luminous heart beat with the song of four-thousand cats.

Crooners who shone in the moonlight mimicry of the spotlight.

Jazz singers. Hip cats that went "scat!"

Busker with open-mouthed hats hungry for a feed.

Parlors paraded purring glamorous songstresses.

Smoky hookahs and smoking hookers.

Strays strummed string and sung a cocktail of cat's tails.

A decadent party of meowing sound.

A bohemian behemoth, post-midnight soirée.

Yeah, it sounds like a total gimmick. But here's the thing: It's awesome. The animation is clean and fluid, the story is fun, and Cave's husky voice adds poetic heft to the story. We won't belabor the point, as you can take a look for yourself:

And in other Nick Cave-animal-narration news (kind of), he'll also be narrating an audiobook version of a novel he wrote, The Death of Bunny Munro (it's actually a book about a "sex-obsessed traveling salesman"). Equally poetic in a different way, Cave's book contains gems like "and like an act of love he sucks deep on a Lambert & Butler... and he says 'fuck,' and blows two furious tusks of smoke from his nostrils."

Related links:

Catching Up With... Nick Cave

CatPianoFilm.com

YouTube: Charlie Schmidt's "Cool Cat"

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