Cats Parent Guide

I won’t ever forget the sense of wonder I felt watching Cats on stage in Los Angeles in 1985. I was swept away by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical score and intrigued by the staging. It was a magical night.

Cats is back, adapted for the big screen. Although there’s lots of CGI wizardry here, the magic I felt all those years ago only flickers to life sporadically. As I sat through the movie, watching the colorful images splash across a massive screen and listening to the unforgettable music pour out of the surround sound speakers, I wondered why this production lacked the enchantment of the stage performance. After two hours musing in a dark theater, I came up with some answers.

This production’s most obvious problem is the appearance of the cats themselves. In the stage show, the cats are obviously humans dressed in costumes and the audience accepts them as such. But in this movie adaptation, the actors are covered in CGI fur making them look part human/part cat. Our brains register the ears, whiskers, fur, and tails which look cat-like, but we also see the human eyes, noses, hands and overall proportions. The female cats also have very obvious breasts, which is almost as disconcerting as their human faces. The shift between human and feline appearance happens so often it’s difficult to settle into one single perspective on the characters. It creates a feline version of the uncanny valley phenomenon that can be so disconcerting in computer generated human characters.

Cats also has massive problems with pacing; the entire first half of the movie is almost unwatchable. I spent the first 40 minutes or so squirming like I was attending a bad high school musical, checking my watch every ten minutes. The film only hits its stride when Judy Dench and Ian McKellan appear on screen at the halfway mark. Dench, who plays Old Deuteronomy, carries herself with the stateliness befitting the cat who will make the Jellicle choice and select the cat who gets to be reborn to a new life. And McKellan, as Gus the Theatre Cat, possesses a pathos and tattered dignity that is incredibly poignant. This duo, along with Jennifer Hudson, who plays the melancholy, despondent Grisabella, finally bring a solid emotional core to the film and give the audience something to care about. And when Hudson belts out a show-stopping, tear-infused version of “Memory”, the magic glimmers again.

Sadly, even the wonderful musical score doesn’t have enough charm to save the film. There’s not a lot of serious negative content, but if the number of bathroom breaks taken by the kids sitting in front of me is any indication, this isn’t a movie for young viewers. There’s no point spending good money for your kids to get bored - they can do that for free at home. We don’t have nine lives and don’t need to waste the one we get on a charmless film.