I used to post trailers all the time and I don’t post trailers anymore but I have to post this trailer because what the actual fuck.
I… what?
Judi Dench concurs:
herewith the ‘Cats’ trailer, because OMG
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It’s Uncanncy Valley: The Movie.
Uncatty Valley.
TIL no one on the Internet™ has ever seen Cats, the 4th longest running musical in history. Because I have seen it, and friends, this is what it looks like.
The original musical was a little cheesy. The trailer is like being boiled to death in cheese, and then they add even hotter cheese so that your skull turns instantly into liquid.
I have to ask, in all seriousness: Wasn’t there a single adult human being involved in the process, at any point, who said, “It’s not too late to stop this”? But I ask the same question about almost everything that’s happened in the world in the past few years.
Insert “Game of Thrones Viserys Death” gif here.
“The original musical was a little cheesy.”
Lol, yeah, no. Cats is beyond cheesy. Cats points and laughs at cheese. At one point in the show, a stage hand tosses a prop representing a shoe, scaled to the height of the actors as cats, onto the stage. The cast looks at it and goes right on singing.
The time for an adult to say “It not too late to stop this” was like 1979. Now, it’s a thing. To look at this and say “Too much” is just missing the anthropomorphic forest for the CGI trees.
I’m likely going to avoid this be cause Cats is a bad musical and Andrew Lloyd Webber should be taken to an alley and beaten for his many sins. Not because Tom Hooper and co. somehow did it wrong in the visuals.
It isn’t what the stage version looks like, though:
The cats are a lot more, well, catlike, onstage, and also you see them at a distance, which lends an impressionistic quality to them. Onstage, the actors look like humans in cat makeup. In this trailer, the actors look like the result of some sort of ungodly Frankenstein experiment to meld humans and felines. I find it terrifying. (I’m sure Ian Malcolm would have something to say about the filmmakers thinking too much about whether they *could* achieve this affect, and not enough about whether they *should.*) The cat people in *Doctor Who* look way better, and that was done just with makeup.
Isn’t it though?
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I dunno, seems of a kind. I’m just shocked to find myself in a position of defending Cats, of all (horrible, ridiculous, inexplicably popular) things, from irony poisoning.
I see a qualitative difference. I’m sure the filmmakers thought they were making the cats look more “realistic.” I guess there was no one to tell them otherwise.
Yep. Definitely a good time to break out the overused Ian Malcolm GIF.
Useless trivia connecting Cats and Doctor Who: Before playing Doctor Who companion Melanie Bush, Bonnie Langford was in the original production of Cats as Rumpleteazer.
Even more useless trivia just about me: I learnt Skimbleshanks, my favourite song from Cats, in Japanese to sing for my teacher for an end-of-year oral test. Having done that, I have more respect for the translators who turned Eliot’s poems into Japanese than the fools making this movie. However it goes, I hope it’s not mediocre. Meaning, if it’s going to be crap, then I want it to be spectacularly crap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjeC5EYkCys
Midnight, and the kitties are sleeping,
All alone by the furnace,
Where the birdies are cheeping.
In the room the women come and go.
Talking of Michelangelo.
And also of cats.
But mainly of Michelangelo
Because you know, art…
The Lion King and Cats are two different approaches to musicals about animals — or really, musicals about human stories, in animal guise. Lion King opted for photorealism that sacrificed animated expressiveness. Cats is going for CGI-furred but still recognizably human actors, doing human emoting. I was really hoping that this would be the better way.
Now… I want a third option. Did no one consider that Cats would look AMAZING as a traditional 2D animated feature? (The Lion King sure did.) Or if it must be live-action, then bring back practical costumes and effects, please. Ron Perlman’s Vincent in Beauty and the Beast looked MILES better than this.
Oh well. With Hamilton’s choreographer and Les Twins and Francesca Hayward involved, maybe at least there’ll be some good dancing.
What if you took the Lion King “live action” approach?
Actual cat characters acting catlike, doing funny cat stuff, but also singing?
If you made the faces more expressive, I think the Lion King approach might actually work for Cats.
More “humanly” expressive faces on photoreal cat bodies is its own kind of creepy. If you make the faces more expressive, then it’s not photoreal, so there’s no point to the rest of their bodies being photoreal either. Because photoreal images are supposed to fool you into thinking “wow, that’s real!” which doesn’t work when the supposedly real animals aren’t acting like real animals at all. (Which is the problem with The Lion King.)
If you do both cartoonishly expressive CGI animal faces AND bodies together, it can turn out well. In fact, that’s exactly what Disney did themselves, with Zootopia! Cats done in the style of Zootopia would have been absolutely delightful.
As far as humans portraying animals, I think The Little Prince solved the challenge way back in 1974: just start with real animals, then swap them out for human actors at the appropriate times, with zero explanation. I had no problem seeing a snake turn into Bob Fosse, or a fox turn into Gene Wilder. :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXonK8EBqmk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkiZuu79N_I
I’m fascinated with Steven Spielberg’s animated version–which was in development for a while back in the 1990s–though mostly because the screenplay was by Tom Stoppard.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/stunning-concept-art-for-spielbergs-animated-cats-movie-1599739506
That concept art looks gorgeous! Ah, what could have been.
wow! loved that film… haven’t seen it in years and i always thought bob fosse was the snake right from the beginning…
Brush up your snakespeare!
Hey, somebody had to say it….
This is going to give me nightmares in the months to come.
BAHAHAHAHAHA!! Love these:
https://twitter.com/bobmarshall/status/1151973931940757506?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1151973931940757506&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.refinery29.com%2Fen-us%2F2019%2F07%2F238328%2Fcats-trailer-reactions-memes
https://twitter.com/AndySwift/status/1152005013079642112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1152005013079642112&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.refinery29.com%2Fen-us%2F2019%2F07%2F238328%2Fcats-trailer-reactions-memes
More here.
Of the top 12 longest running Broadway musicals, only this, Wicked, and the 1976 revival of Oh! Calcutta! haven’t been adapted into a film (or were based on Disney films). Of those, only Rent and Jersey Boys (and maybe Phantom of the Opera) really tanked at the box office. And Wicked, at one point to be released this December, is currently slated for December 2021.
You could argue that Cats is past its prime – its 2016 revival only ran a year, though it’s currently touring nationally. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that no one wanted this.
As much as this is more confirmation that Andrew Lloyd Webber is clearly not my thing, I’m getting convinced that this needs to be in the world and needs to be as bananas as possible.
Added to agree a 2D or 3D animated adaptation would probably be more palatable and I’d be more interested.