That trailer looked awful last night when I saw it, but holy crap I just got out of seeing the new Lion King and that puts it massively into perspective that Disney knows how to do realistically rendered talking animals right
How big are the cats?
This shouldn’t be difficult. In TS Eliot’s poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the cats are the size of cats. In the stage musical Cats, the cats are the size of people. But here? It’s hard to know. In one shot, a cat just about fits into a standard dustbin (too big for a cat), another gets its paw stuck in a standard mousetrap (the correct size for a cat). Then there’s this shot, where an entire cat is roughly the size of a standard dining knife (too small for a cat, much too small for a cat). How the hell are audiences supposed to enjoy Cats if they’re constantly trying to discern scale, Tom Hooper?
They could have done Starlight Express and borrow the race sequences and cyborg costumes from Alita Battle Angel and it would have worked and not caused any nightmares.
I’ve seen Cats on stage and I agree with @krayzkrok and @BennyProfane. This looks pretty much exactly the way I remember it on stage.
Now I personally did not like the musical. As far as I could tell the musical didn’t really have much of a coherent story and I’m also not a cat person, so the whole Cats musical phenomena didn’t resonate with me. But a lot of people really do love the musical, so it’s entirely possible I just don’t get it.
I suspect part of why some people love the musical is they like actual feline creatures (no not in a furry way, just in a cat lover way) and they think seeing people acting like felines on stage is fun. But I don’t know if that same phenomena will work in a film. I think we’re just too use to films being magical, and the same thing that seems really neat on stage might seem completely pedestrian on film.
It would be interesting to hear from someone that actually loved the musical and see how they felt about the trailer.
Here you go. Cats explained by an actual fan.
Guys…?
I think I kind of like this trailer?
I don’t have any love of the musical. I’m not into furries… I don’t think?
I think it’s mainly the choreography (minus the James Cordon stuff). And the scale of the characters in the world. And maybe that look Jason Derulio gives in that close-up.
…I just watched it a third time.
…I guess someone open a GoFundMe so I can afford treatment?
The explainer was actually helpful. My sixth grade teacher had us study the poems when the show was in town sometime in the late 80s and I had no idea of all the other baggage.
Isn’t most/all of this type of thing done using pretty established motion capture technology that pretty much eliminates the possibility of misalignment?
I found the fur to be off (at least at this point), but I don’t think there’s really any “animation” beyond that to screw up. It’s weird because it’s people crossed with cats, just like the stage musical is weird in the same way.
It’s an intriguing cast and I’m generally a fan of musical adaptations, but not fan enough to ever catch them in theaters. I’ll watch it when it hits Netflix or Amazon.
Is it the video compression motion interpolation or do some of the mouths/faces seem transposed onto the actors in motion? Or preproduction woes need to fixing in post? Some scenes seem “off” with Cheshire Cat type mis-alignments.
I loved what Unbreakable Kimmy Scmidt did with Cats. That is all.
Well at least they didn’t cast a dog to play in it.
The last thirty minutes of the Blank Check with Griffin and David podcast has them going off about the CATS trailer and it’s priceless. (The whole podcast is great, if you don’t know it.)
These are CG? I thought they were just in weird fur suits.
My 6 year old saw the trailer to this in front of the Lion King: “Why do they all have human lips? I do NOT want to watch that.”
Folks keep talking about how the faces don’t fit or are floating on the heads or something, and I guess I just don’t see it. I’m sure there’s CG involved, but to me it looks like very thoroughly applied make up. Shrug.
Same here.
If you’re disturbed by anthropomorphic cats, you’d be similarly disturbed by the stage version. This just makes the blending a bit more, well, blended.
It’s not like they took full cat bodies and stuck human faces on them. These are still, proportionally, human bodies with cat elements added on, just like the stage version.
Yeah, i had heard they were fursuits, this is the first thread that suggested they were cg. They looked like costumes to me. But then again, i haven’t really followed this thing.
I’m pretty sure they’re CG (or at least involve a lot of CG). I just don’t understand why they’re substantially more creepy than than the stage suits + heavy makeup combo.
Going off the delightful twitter Cats Story video @Scrax linked to above which includes excerpts from stage performances of Cats, it looks like the stage version costumes are more clothes the actors are putting on, whereas the movie looks more like skintight suits. I’m not sure this distinction exists in the cat world, but as a dog person, one could distinguish between the stage performance looks like long-haired dogs (e.g., German Shepherds, Collies) as required to hide their bulkier costumes whereas the movie version looks more like very short-haired dogs (e.g., Beagles, Pugs), which maybe they’re able to do with some help of CG.
I don’t think they’re putting people’s faces on to fully CG models, but they might be digitally applying fur to actors in skintight clothing. I don’t see how that could make the faces look out of synch though. I think just the whole idea of people trying to look like cats is just kind of off putting and that’s mostly what’s creeping people out.