How do you solve a problem like "Cats"?
Tuesday, December 24, 2019 at 5:09PM 
With Cats horrifying audiences around the world, including possibly you, let's all step into a hot-air balloon and travel to the heavenly lands of speculation. You see, a screen adaptation of the silliest mega-musical in Andrew Lloyd Weber's repertoire (give or take Love Never Dies or Starlight Express) was already a dicey proposition, but it needn't be so doomed. But add to that the deranged incompetence of Tom Hooper and digital fur technology,and we have something for the pantheon of all-time bad movies.
What could have been done to avoid catastrophe? Many psychologically scarred movie-goers may be asking this question from the depths of the madness that now consumes them: Could this have been any different? Could it have been better? Could it have been good, even? Maybe…
Here are three ways to fix Cats that don't include visual effects patches.
Turn it into an animated feature
This one seems quite obvious. There's no way in hell, people acting as cats will ever be anything but laugh-inducing. In the theatre, it arguably works but that's due to the specificities of that art form. Distance, both physical and aesthetic, is one of them. You can't have that on a big-screen adaptation, for there are close-ups and the sheer size of the screen to consider. The best way to fix all of this is to make it animated. Do it in the style of Cats Don't Dance or Zootopia. Those filmmakers at least managed to create anthropomorphized felines that aren't horrifying to behold.
Embrace the artifice
If you're dead-set on making it a live-action adaptation, one way to go about it is to fully embrace the artifice of the premise and setting. In the actual film, there's a lot of visual references to early cinema, including a poster for 1927's The Cat and the Canary. Wouldn't it have been fun to make a pastiche of Old Hollywood musical productions with anti-naturalistic studio sets and glamourous cat-people? Fuse the magical fakeness of Busby Berkeley with modern sensibilities, a punch of earnest feeling and all the razzle-dazzle that doesn't involve interspecies hybrids with smooth crotches. In other words, give this to Baz Luhrmann instead of Tom Hooper. Alternatively, travel in time and have Ken Russell direct the horniest permutation of Cats the human mind can conceive.
Make it more "theatrical"
Maybe the best way to bring Cats to the big screen is to avoid the excision of theatrical elements. Instead of making it cinematic, make it even more stage-bound, with Brechtian mechanisms and elaborate illusions. There's no need to go to the extremes of Dogville but Joe Wright's Anna Karenina could be a good model to follow. Add a bit of Gaspar Noé's Climax and you're set for success. Such a thing might be worth seeing for its spectacle rather than for its wrong-headed grotesquerie.
Or, you know, don't make a movie out of Cats. Didn't Six Degrees of Separation teach us anything about the absurdity of that folly?
Reader Comments (11)
Joe Wright made Anna Karenina, not Edgar. Also, I think an animated version would have been okay, or even do full stage theatrics like you suggested. As it stands it’s a film that I laughed at hysterically and kept dropping my mouth in shock of all the terrible filmmaking decisions. Oy vey!
Six Degrees of Separation was just on TV and making a bad movie version of CATS is a major plot point!
Keelay! -- Thank you for catching the typo. I can't believe I reread this and didn't catch the silly mistake. Anyway, all the feedback is appreciated so, once more, thank you.
An animated version of Cats would've worked but a version like Anna Karenina? I don't think so. That was a terrible film.
I think Baz Luhrmann would've been a better choice to do a film version of Cats since the play is over-the-top and insane from what I've heard.
Sadly, Tom Hooper made it and it's shit. He's trying to save face by releasing an improved version. That's not going to work either as it's clear he and whatever young movie executive haven't learned the lessons of Heaven's Gate.
For those of you who had never seen or heard about the debacle that was Heaven's Gate, you're in for a history lesson.
Here's a film made by an Academy Award-winning filmmaker who is given carte blanche to make his revisionist western about the Johnson Country Wars with an initial budget of nearly $12 million that was set for a Xmas 1979 release by United Artists. Instead, things went very bad due to egomania, radical casting decisions, cocaine, and all sorts of shit as it missed its Xmas '79 deadline and was pushed to Xmas '80. In November of 1980, the film premiered with a lot of bad buzz and press surrounding the film before its release. What happened was a disaster and after a one-week run in New York City, it got pulled from theaters where months of more editing came in as the film with its 219-minute running time was reduced to 149-minutes in re-release in April of 1981 where it did much worse.
As a result, Heaven's Gate had a final budget of $44 million and only made $3.5 million as it would have United Artists be sold to MGM, ending the auteur-era of New Hollywood, and derailed the career of its filmmaker Michael Cimino.
An animated version is a terrific alternative to me. If someone develop that idea I would pay my ticket for watch that.
However I'm not so enthusiastic with the idea of a complete anthropomorphization of the characters.
I know I already said this, but I will insist that the design style of The Aristocats characters is perfect: the drawings are beautiful; the shapes, proportions and movements refer to a feline and they continue to look like cats even when they act, sing and dance like humans
Cesar: Agreed. There's ALWAYS going to be a place for anthros (when a vision of HELL exists that's filtered through an anthro character design sensibility...), but that's probably not the best angle for a Cats movie and I'd rather yours, which, incidentally, was also where Spielberg wanted it to go (significantly more stylized then what you mention, but not in an anthro way) when he was trying to produce it.
Cat's don't Dance is a masterpiece.
Feels nice knowing that Hooper has an Oscar instead of Fincher.
An animated film that used rotoscoping for the dance sequences could've been very interesting. It would've given it an ethereal, otherworldly quality.
The fact is that Cats, the stage show, works because it is live. It is not a work that could just be plopped into a different medium basically as-is and expected to work. It needed to find the cinema equivalent to its theatricality. It would require smart adaptation and a real visionary director, which Tom Hooper is not. He is literal-minded and best suited for straightforward talky historical pieces with folks in drawing rooms.
correct on making it animated and have actual cats as characters. think puss in boots on his cutest watery eyes singing memories.... so real.
correct on giving this to Baz
I just saw it's more ridiculous than terrible- the dancing is specially good except when Tom Hooper goes crazy editing so we really can't enjoy it. Animation would have allowed the film to get away with some of it's more demented moments like the Busbey Berkley roaches scene. The original material was never that great to begin with- there are only a couple of good songs.