I originally came to see Cats out of pure morose curiosity.
Sure, I like theater, but the trailers promised something broken, human faces amateurishly graphed on garishly disfigured, writhing CGI feline bodies that looked like the work of a broken deepfakes algorithm. The faces just kind of floated at times, and that gave the trailer a surreal nightmarish quality. The more I endured it, the more curious I became. Originally planned as an animated feature by Amblin in the ‘90s, this iteration directed by Tom Hooper, who gave us the excellent Les Misérables and the utterly forgettable King’s Speech, seemed like a good fit in theory. It was Hooper’s hybrid take of using mocap for performances on CGI cat bodies where things quickly started to fall apart.
The classic musical is the story of a group of singing/dancing anthropomorphic cats in London the night of the Jellicle Ball. The Ball is where one cat is chosen to be reincarnated, goes to kitty heaven, or something. It’s never super clear what exactly happens, and I even tried to google this to no avail. All we know is everyone has to perform in front of Judi Dench, aka Old Deuteronomy, and the winner gets to fly off, hopefully to a better place. But evil pussy Macavity (Idris Elba) wants to win at any cost, and is using his magical teleporting ability to kidnap his feline competition, stranding them on a boat. We experience this night through the wide eyes of Victoria (Francesca Hayward), who is abandoned by her family just as the film begins, discovering the competition and its participants as the night progresses.
The biggest flaw in Cats is that at moments it’s actually kind of genius, and at times breathtaking, and then it simply turns to shit in the same beat. While it generally does look better than the trailer, which was a much earlier render, the final product is still very uneven and suffers from not just the trailer’s animation irregularities, but some poor design choices. When the cats don’t move a whole lot and just sing standing still, they look their best. It’s when they dance and move a lot that the two feel like they were culled from two very different sources; like a dancer and an actor, and simply married together in post. The real wrench here is when the animation drops in quality or doesn’t synch up during one of these graphed together performances, and the ghastliness of this unholy digital alchemy becomes apparent.
I really went in just expecting just to laugh my way through it.
The woman sitting next to me was obviously ready, as the smell of vodka wafting from her Starbucks coffee tumbler let me know she wasn’t fuckin’ around.
But the longer I sat there, the more its dark ritual began to take its toll on me, both as a critic and as a human being. As I peered deep into the cinematic abyss that is Cats, it nearly broke me. The thing is, the longer I watched this two hour cinematic car crash, I could begin to see inspired shards of a what could have been a masterpiece in the twisted carnage flickering in that darkened theater. The film’s nonsensical Jellicle plot and logic of Taylor Swift’s bizarre kitty cleavage are of little consequence with enough spectacle applied. I mean maybe another two years of development and you could have had the musical equivalent to Avatar – easy.
Instead we have this half-baked abomination, and that’s the heartbreaking thing that ultimately made Cats hard to watch.
I could genuinely see what it could have been, not just what was.