Published at 7:30 AM on September 14, 2009

By Michael Saba

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."

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