Episode 125 - Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019)

Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Chris and Alex return from their extended summer break with this discussion of the much-maligned musical Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019), a film whose reputation as a big-budget misjudgment has perhaps overwhelmed the intricacies of its uncanny constitution, and in particular how the narrative’s negotiation of its A-list performers speaks to the vexed question of actorly labour and agency in an age of heightened visual effects production. Listen as they wade through Cats’ unsettling feline character design and the integration of digital effects that build disconcerting bodies with multiple moving parts; theatricality and spontaneity in histories of the Hollywood musical; scale and the fantasy of space in director Tom Hooper’s execution of the film’s song-and-dance routines; editing choices and the presentation of blockbuster spectacle; and how the controversial digitised production of Cats taps into recent debates regarding the exploitation of the VFX sector and the many artists who build our CG-enhanced screen fantasies.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

  • Grimm, Devlin. 2019. “Allegorical Cats, Metaphorical Cats: “CATS” and the Pleasure of an Uneasy Image.” animationstudies2.0 (December), available at: https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=3385. 

  • Mueller, John, 1984. “Fred Astaire and the Integrated Musical,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (Autumn): 28-40.

  • Lury, Karen. 2010. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales. London: I.B. Tauris.

  • Moen, Kristian. 2009. “‘Never Has One Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoria’: Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860-1889.” Comparative Critical Studies 6, no. 3: 361-372.

  • Monod, David. 2020. Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

  • Shearer, Martha, 2016. New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantMUSICAL, SPECIAL EFFECTS, HOLLYWOOD, ADAPTATION, STARDOMComment