The Filming of Cats is a Difficult Matter

I love cats.  I also love plays.  So of course it's a no-brainer that one of my favorite plays is Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats".

I saw the musical “Cats” at TPAC when I was 13 or 14, and loved it so much I bought the soundtrack.  I’ve only seen it on stage the one time, but I’ve watched the play on home video many times.  I have large portions of the soundtrack memorized.  It remains one of my favorite plays to this day.  So when I heard they were making a theatrical version, it piqued my interest.  Well, the trailer for the Cats movie dropped earlier this week, and the internet isn’t happy.

You know, I agreed about Sonic being a terrible character design.  I see their point about the new Lion King looking flat and emotionless compared to the original.  While I liked Green Lantern more than most people, they did keep getting Ryan’s head the wrong size.  And Wil Smith’s Genie did look a bit goofy in his blue form.  But I have to draw the line here.

Yes, the cats look kind of creepy, and border on the Uncanny Valley.  Their insertion into the oversized backgrounds looks sort of off, and the whole thing just makes you feel slightly uneasy.  Some of the shots look a little unfinished, so hopefully they’re still tweaking it.  But let’s be honest, the makeup in the original play was a bit strange itself.  When I saw the play back in the 80s, I heard a few adults talk about how creepy the makeup was.  Beautiful, sure, but it still straddled that Uncanny Valley.  To me, the film’s design looks like the natural progression of the stage version’s makeup.  It looks like what the stage make-up artists would like to have done if it were possible.

In my opinion, Cats was always supposed to feel weird and disorienting.  The oversized props in the stage play aren’t just to make the cast look smaller, they also serve to make the audience feel smaller as well.  As if the cats have used magic to shrink you down, translate their language, and make their faces just human enough for you to identify with them, all so you can finally understand the world from their point of view.  If they’d wanted them to look more catlike, they could have just thrown cats masks on them and called it a day.  But I think they wanted them to have human-like faces and expressions so the audience could empathize with them.  And yeah, the film version is a little reminiscent of “Seaman” for the Dreamcast, but at least it’s eye-catching.

This is not a straightforward story like Sweeney Todd or Les Miserables, and should not be compared to those.  Cats is more like a feature length music video, comparable to The Who’s “Tommy” or “Pink Floyd: The Wall”.  Can you honestly say this movie looks freakier than, say, the video for “Black Hole Sun”?  Kids these days have no tolerance for the surreal.  Get off my lawn, ya unimaginative little toddlers who need reality spoon fed to you.  After Lion King and Sonic, it’s like the internet is just looking for special effects to hate.  I pity any special effects artist who tries to do anything actually creative over the next few years.

People are asking, why not just keep the original makeup?  I agree, the stage makeup was great, and is perfectly filmworthy.  But you do realize, you can already buy a filmed version of the stage musical on DVD?  Honestly, what would even be the point of giving it a movie budget, if it wasn’t going to do something original with it?  And as odd as the new movie looks, I bet that within ten minutes you get used to it.

I love going to plays, but it’s definitely a rich person’s hobby.  I hope Cats does well in theaters, because I want them to make more theatrical versions of stage plays.  Cats is being released on the same day as Star Wars IX, so I don’t expect it to break any box office records.  Actually, I expect it’s going to bomb pretty hard.  But I hope not.  Sidetrack: My favorite part of seeing musicals in the theater is seeing how many people leave once they realize it’s a musical.  I witnessed it during “Sweeney Todd” and “Into The Woods”, and I wonder if it will happen here.  I mean, the trailer makes it look pretty obvious that it's a musical, but so did some of the other musicals.

Anyway, the Uncanny Valley can be a disorienting place, but that doesn’t mean it’s always bad.  A lot of movies have intentionally set up camp in that valley, and still turned out pretty well.  Heck, I heard mentions of the Uncanny Valley when Avatar was released, and look how much money that made.

Still, as Bombalurina says, haters gonna hate.