Fur flies over confounding first look at Cats

Opinion

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This article was published 27/07/2019 (2266 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

wfpyoutube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq50F-IDXDc:wfpyoutube

There’s an old joke that the internet was invented for cat pictures and porn. The new trailer for Cats manages to combine both those functions.

The 153-second teaser features bizarro human-feline hybrids who are covered in fur and still strangely nude. And that’s not even the weirdest thing about this trailer.

The movie, slated for a 2019 holiday release, is an adaptation of the inescapable Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical, which had record-setting runs on Broadway and in London’s West End. Even this brief reveal of director Tom Hooper’s big-screen vision got the fur flying on social media when it dropped last week.

The hate-watching rapidly rose to grumpy-cat levels. I went in expecting the worst and instead found myself transfixed by its trippiness. That’s not to say Cats will end up being a good movie, but at least its badness isn’t dull.

A lot of freaked-out feline-phobic viewers were responding to what they saw as unsettling sexual content, which goes way beyond the slinky, cat-suited prowling of the stage play.

The trailer toys with us, feline-style. It gives us beautiful performers, including Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Hudson and Jason Derulo, and then creeps into uncomfortable, cross-species, hot-cat confusion. There are cats with people-breasts or — in one much-memed shot — a strategically placed and very phallic tail.

Some of the cats wear clothes, but most go au naturel, with a smooth blankness where the genitalia would be. As several internet commentators pointed out, this somehow ends up being more disturbing than actual genitals.

The cat porn issue is related to a bigger problem. Relying on whizzbang technology but not really thinking through how to use it, the film ends up with kitties that are half realistic, half unrealistic and altogether uncanny.

The stage production of Cats was clear that it featured dancers who were pretending to be animals, matching its goofy premise with stylized makeup and slightly mangy costumes.

The movie adaptation swaps the magic of pretending for an oddly literal stance. The filmmakers use CGI tricks to make every individual strand of fur stand on end, but then blend that hyper-realistic fur into extremely human faces, hands and feet. Neither this nor that, the final effect is unsettling. Sometimes the cats register as animals, and sometimes they look like movie stars in furry onesies.

This isn’t just a Cats problem. Think about Sonic the Hedgehog and his icky people-teeth. Or the recent remake of The Lion King, which plays like a straight-up nature documentary inexplicably invaded by pop tunes and fart jokes.

Just because we can achieve computer-generated furriness, doesn’t mean we should. Technology keeps driving animation and special effects toward hyper-realism, but how realistic do we want singing and dancing housecats to be?

The trailer’s foray into the uncanny valley left viewers with many questions. The scale is also wonky: how can the cats be at once so huge and so teensy? Are they bipeds or quadrupeds? Why do some wear clothes and others not? And why is Judi Dench, her Oscar-winning gravitas morphing into ginger-coloured catness, wearing a fur coat? (Whose fur? The internet demands to know, and every possible answer seems creepy.)

Perhaps the biggest question, though, is who is this movie for?

Because Cats offers an anthropomorphic fusion of animal and human, some commentators suggested that at least furries would like it, to which furries replied, by way of social media, “Uh, no.”

What about movie-goers just looking for a little holiday joy? (Cats will open Dec. 20.) This is, after all, a tremendously popular musical about cats with long, silly names. But the trailer, so dark and spooky, reminds us that Cats is also about aging and death and the precarious lives of showfolk as they look back on their “days in the sun.”

How about scary-movie fans? With its eerie, unclassifiable humaninals, could Cats be considered a very niche horror flick? As one Twitter commentator joked, “The new The Island of Doctor Moreau trailer looks very creepy but I’m not sure about all the singing.”

There are so many questions about this crazy, kooky trailer, and they won’t be answered until December, if then.

Still, there is one very good thing about the catfight over the Cats trailer. It managed to distract from the release of the Top Gun 2: Maverick trailer, in which the 57-year-old Tom Cruise tries to recapture that cocky-flyboy vibe of 1986. Talk about unnatural.