Cats

Ten Second Review: It’s Cats.

I’m obviously late to this party, but as distance often helps with criticism, I thought it might be time for me to use this isolation to finally watch Cats.

Famously plot thin, Lloyd Webber’s musical uses the poems of T.S. Elliot as a starting point for a fanciful imagination of what cats might be doing at night. Each new cat we are introduced to gets a song, this in turn introduces a new cat for which we get another song, and so on. A perfect vehicle for a stage musical where people are going for the fun, the spectacle, the journey and the songs, not the tight intricacies of narrative.

Newly ditched cat Victoria finds herself taken on a whirlwind visitation of the contenders for the Jellicle choice. That’s cats that are seeking some sort of ascension into cat heaven. As she meets each new cat they all sing and dance and she learns about how different cats live and why they think they deserve to be picked. That’s it, that’s the film.

I really feel the point about the lack of plot in Cats has been laboured beyond humour. If you haven’t seen, or aren’t familiar with the stage show, then I can understand how that would be jarring. However, once you tackle that, it’s really a case of why does the film feel so odd. Many films have incredibly thin plots that only really serve as a vehicle for spectacle (Mad Max: Fury Road is a perfect example), but the real difficulty is that in this instance it doesn’t translate well, and that’s largely due to some of the choices that were made.

I’ve never made a big budget Hollywood film and I’ve never had to adapt a long running and incredibly popular stage show into a film either, so I can only imagine the conversation on day one where they sat down and had to decide how that cats would look. You can understand deciding not to go for the costumes, there’s already a film version of the stage production which it would be compared to. You can understand why they didn’t go with just photorealistic animated singing cats (although I’d love to see that). You can also understand, at least somewhat, why they thought full fur animated characters would be a good shout. The problem is, as anyone with eyes will notice, cats and humans have very different anatomical builds. A human standing on two legs is inherently different to a cat on four. So do you make them the height of a cat on four legs or standing on its hind legs. The problems the film has with scale is not the fault of the animators and set designers, it’s a base problem of how something we are having to imagine functions in a real life setting. 

When you watch people in costumes, like in the stage show, your belief is immediately suspended and you instinctively understand you are watching something that is different from reality. By trying to get as close as possible to reality with fur and ears, without just animated cats, the audience is left in a weird limbo. These are not humans as cats and they’re certainly not cats so what am I watching. It doesn’t help that the CGI looked soft and struggles with feeling truly embedded in the environment. The varying degrees of what I’ll dub “cat-ness” between characters also serves to confuse the viewer.

Credit to the team, the sets (if inconsistently sized) are great. They look high quality and choosing to makes sets when so much of the film is CG is a nice move. The music remains fine; it’s not my cup of tea but it’s catchy and you can understand it’s enduring popularity for fans of the style.

Cats is not the worst film I’ve seen recently. It’s also not the most disappointing either as I didn’t have high hopes when it was announced and those were enforced when the trailer was released. It is arguably the weirdest, but I have to say it’s awfulness has been somewhat overwritten. Is it good? Good god no, but hardly the most offensive thing. I might ask though, did it intrigue you? Whether you saw it or not, was there a part of you that couldn’t not discuss it and marvel at the monstrosity? Sometimes the spectacle you set out to make doesn’t quite pan out but at least it’s memorable. I’m always happy to watch a bad film, and I’m not wholly sure I would rewatch this particular one, but I’m quite glad it exists. Yes, it missed the mark, but at least it took a shot.