Review: Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019)

Fig. 1 - Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019).

2019 was a bad year for cats: deaths of notable cats and cat owners, political defeat, and finally, worst of all, Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019) (Fig. 1). When the first Cats trailer was released last summer, it was soon subject to hyperbolic displays of disgust across social media. Reviews of the eventual film were no better. And all the criticisms are true. It is quite astonishing in its lack of either judgement or taste. It is somehow hornier than the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW, 2015-19) Cats parody “Hungry Vagina Metaphor” (see below). One of the notes I made while watching it was simply “Idris honey what.” All that does make Cats sound like fun though, which it is not [1]. It is reportedly on track to lose $100 million.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - “Hungry Vagina Metaphor”.

This is not the first attempt to adapt Cats to the screen. Throughout the 1990s, there were drawn-out, ultimately thwarted efforts to produce an animated film based on the play, executive produced by Steven Spielberg, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Peter Kunze argues that the decision to produce an animated musical was largely made in order to circumvent the “danger” of a live-action musical at a low ebb for the genre, cinematically at least: “the convention of spontaneously bursting into song more seamlessly integrated into a fantastical animated environment” (2017: 24). Such dangers are especially acute with Cats, a near-plotless spectacle (the plot of the film is essentially: at a strange intersection of interwar London, the uncanny valley and the Island of Dr Moreau, some cats have a singing competition and the winner gets a balloon ride). Kunze also details creative conflicts around the appearance of the cats themselves. Stoppard suggested they “appear twice: as humans perceive them and as cats do,” while Trevor Nunn, who directed the original West End production, argued for a “comic ‘double-take’ effect, wherein the cats are alternately cats and human-like.” Kunze suggests that such doubling “revealed an interpretative crux that goes back to Eliot’s book itself: Are the cats human-like (dressed in clothes, for example), or do their natural features motivate those perceptions?” (ibid.: 24-25).

This adaptation’s approach to the project’s “interpretative crux” and fluctuating anthropomorphic characterisations is less doubling and more hybridity. But these cats are also more unsettling than other human-animal hybrids. Glenn Willmott describes Donald Duck, for example, as “neither a bird that talks, nor a human who quacks, but a unified organic figure with traces of duck and human drawn into each vocal syllable and graphic line” (2010: 840). These cats, meanwhile, have human faces, feet and hands (and sometimes boobs) but are covered in fur and have cat ears, tails and whiskers. Sometimes the cats wear human clothes and shoes, sometimes they take off those clothes, which is altogether too much for a U certificate film, and sometimes they zip off their fur to reveal bedazzled fur underneath. Judi Dench’s Old Deuteronomy wears a fur coat; it’s unclear whether that fur is cat fur (I would not personally wear a coat made of human skin). The film’s lyrics tell us over and over again that we are watching cats, yet these “cats” are unfortunately burdened with the bodies of humans, prowling around like they’ve been told to be a cat in year nine drama class. Their human body parts and proportions only highlight the inadequacy of their digital fur to convey any kind of cat-ness. For me, they were most reminiscent of the app Elf Yourself, which allows you to add photos of your friends’ and family’s faces to the animated dancing bodies of Christmas elves. Cat Yourself? Jellicle Cat Yourself?

Fig. 2 - Furry fixed cat.

So as Sophie Lewis observes, Cats is not really about cats at all. We are constantly aware that these cats are human; that is the point. But there is a fundamental clash of aesthetic registers between the overriding photorealist norms of contemporary VFX, with a clear effort to make the cats’ fur look like that of a real cat, and the act of grafting that fur onto the body of Ian McKellen and making him miaow. This is to say nothing of the human-faced mice and cockroaches. While Lewis compares the cats to furries (the anthropomorphic animal fandom), actually existing furries have not taken kindly to such comparisons, and some have engaged in a project to “fix” Cats, invoking a cel animation style that resolves the continual blurring of the line between animation and live-action produced by the film’s digital images (Fig. 2).

The real problem with Cats is that despite looking as it does, it is fundamentally soporific. Watching a cat in film—their textures and movements and unpredictability—can be one of cinema’s great pleasures. Mihaela Mihailova argues that cats “most fully embody the essence of animation itself” in their hypnotic kinesis and flux and their glitchy, chaotic energy. Cats has moments where it is fully committed to that principle, in however deranged a fashion (Idris honey what). Mostly, though, it is like listening to someone else describe their dreams: bizarre and incomprehensible things keep happening, yet very little of it is at all engaging. That is partly because these cats behave more like dogs (apologies to dogs). Radha O’Meara (2014) argues that the appeal of internet cat videos is the unselfconsciousness of cats, as opposed to videos of dogs, who are generally shown performing on command. The “cats” of Cats, meanwhile, mostly convey not unselfconscious feline chaos but training and posing.

Its baffling nonsense does have enjoyable moments: Dench bringing all the Oscar-winning gravitas she can to the line, “You will never be my jellicle choice” cannot help but be hilarious. The thing is, so many movies are essentially dumb contrivances, but the more efficient products simply mask it better. The film’s clumsy visual style and use of digital imagery also provokes its own detachment; the precise mechanics of how this film was shot are constantly in one’s mind. Or as Marx put it, “it is by their imperfections that the means of production in any process bring to our attention their character of being the products of past labour. A knife which fails to cut, a piece of thread which keeps on snapping, forcibly remind us of Mr A, the cutler, or Mr B, the spinner” (1990: 289). VFX artists—some of the industry’s most precarious workers—will be lumbered with this film on their CVs, a film where almost nothing was thought through, a film so obviously rushed that the studio took the unprecedented step of releasing an “improved” version a few days into its release, a product of an industry devoted to the most ridiculous endeavours for the faint glimmer of profit, at the expense of both its workers and its audiences. Kay Dickinson argues that films that “don’t work” are therefore instructive: “Without even realizing it, the market as it stands exposes its own vulnerability and thus unwittingly sabotages itself a little every time it lets loose a mismatch into the world” (2008: 29). Who did this? What system produced this? How is this where our precious resources are directed? In all seriousness, how did this get made?

Dedicated to Bedith, who would have had no time for any of this.

**Article published: January 10, 2020**

Notes

[1] Full disclosure: I came to the film already a certified Cats-hater. But I did see it with my aunt, a fan of the play, and she fell asleep.

References

Dickinson, Kay. Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Kunze, Peter C. “Herding Cats; or, The Possibilities of Unproduction Studies,” Velvet Light Trap 80 (Fall 2017): 18-31.

Marx, Karl. Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Classics, 1990).

O’Meara, Radha. “Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos,” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 17, no. 2 (2014), available at: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/794/0.

Willmott, Glenn. “Cat People,” Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 4 (November 2010): 839-856.

Biography

Martha Shearer is Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She is the author of New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and is currently co-editing two books: Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons, with Julie Lobalzo Wright, and Women and New Hollywood, with Aaron Hunter.