Native New Yorkers is the one-minute animated comedy that captures the absurdity of city life better than any prestige drama — and its cast lives rent-free in the walls.
There are maybe a hundred ways to make a film about New York City. You can go cinematic — rain-slicked streets, yellow cabs, Gershwin underneath. You can go gritty. You can go satirical. But 122
Studios found the one angle nobody had fully claimed: rat’s-eye view. Not metaphorically. Literally. Two rats. One subway car. One minute of the most brutally accurate New York commentary you’ll see
all year. Native New Yorkers introduces us to Sal Crumbetti and Vinnie Sharpwhisker — two lifelong residents of the NYC subway system, and frankly two of the most opinionated New Yorkers in any
borough. As the morning rush hour packs the car around them, they hold court. Rent hikes. Six-dollar slices. The moral abyss of a $7 bagel scrap. And the most terrifying prospect of all: moving to Jersey. “The humans freeze. The rats don’t even notice. That’s the joke — and also, somehow, the truth.”

The genius of the film’s setup is how effortlessly it inverts the normal order of the subway. Sal and Vinnie aren’t running from anyone. They’re not scurrying in the background. They’re debating city living
— casually, eloquently, with the weary authority of two creatures who have been here since the city started charging rent. The entire train car of humans stands frozen around them, faces locked in the
silent, collective horror of a Tuesday morning commute. Nobody moves. The rats do not care. It’s a one-minute film, and it uses every second. Director Joe Swift knows that comedy at this scale
lives or dies by timing, and Native New Yorkers has an almost musical sense of rhythm — the pause before the punchline, the cut that lands just right, the throwaway line about Jersey delivered with the
exact gravity it deserves.

Sal Crumbetti
THE ANXIOUS ONE
Soft-hearted, a little overwhelmed, and deeply,
personally offended by the cost of a pizza slice. Sal
is every New Yorker who has ever done the mental
math on whether they can stay. He can. He just
doesn’t want to think about it right now

Vinnie Sharpwhisker
THE TRUE BELIEVER
Sarcastic. Loyal. Aggressively, almost
philosophically pro-New York. Vinnie has heard
every argument for leaving and dismissed every
single one. Jersey is not a solution. Jersey is a
surrender. He’s made his peace with the rent.

What makes Sal and Vinnie work as a comic duo isn’t that they disagree — it’s that they agree on everything that matters. They love this city. They’re furious at it. They would never leave. These are not
contradictions. These are simply the terms of being a New Yorker, whether you pay rent in Bedford-Stuy or you live rent-free in the infrastructure of the L train.

There’s something quietly ambitious happening underneath the comedy. Native New Yorkers is, at its core, about belonging — about what it means to claim a city as yours when that city is actively, almost
aggressively trying to price you out of it. Sal and Vinnie have no leases, no landlords, no rent stabilization. They simply live here because they always have, because this is where they are from, because the city is theirs in the way cities belong to the people who refuse to leave them. That’s a very New York thing to feel. And the film, with two animated rats and sixty seconds of screen time, manages to make you feel it too. Produced entirely by 122 Studios — the Emmy-nominated creative production house led by director Joe Swift — Native New Yorkers is a showcase for what the studio does at its best: sharp, specific storytelling with a cinematic eye and a genuine sense of humor. The AI-generated animation serves the characters rather than overshadowing them, keeping the focus where it belongs — on the dialogue, the timing, and two rats who have genuinely seen some things.