Cats movie: REAL reason for dramatic Judi Dench CGI change REVEALED after huge backlash
Cats will arrive in UK cinemas next Friday, November 20. With the cast boasting the likes of Taylor Swift, Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, it was always going to make a splash. But no one realised quite how big a wave the new take on the musical was going to cause until the first trailer was released earlier this year.
The first look at Cats arrived back in July and sparked an instant worldwide frenzy, especially on social media.
Twitter was flooded with memes and criticism as masses of fans mocked and/or complained the CGI work used to make the human actors into felines, much of the attention focused on the odd effect it had on Dench’s appearance as Old Deutoronomy.
By the time the latest trailer dropped last month, dramatic changes were evident.
Director Tom Hooper has since revealed the reason the cats in Cats now look so different, pointing to the fact that, when the initial clip was unveiled, it was still very early in the process.
“We’d only finished shooting in March, so all the visual effects [in the trailer] were at quite an early stage,” he told Empire Magazine.
The director went on to admit the backlash had an effect on how they proceeded to work on the movie.
“Possibly there were, in the extremity in some of the responses, some clues in how to keep evolving,” he said.
“When you watch the finished film, you’ll see that some of the designs of the cats have moved on since then, and certainly our understanding of how to use the technology to make them work has gone up, too.”
While it’s clear there has been a big change from the first trailer to the second, the difference isn’t as though the team behind Cats undertook a total CGI redesign — like with the new Sonic the Hedgehog — but rather just lots of fine tuning.
The characters now have a more blended version of the humanoid feline faces which first appeared in the July trailer, everything sitting slightly more comfortably than before.
Lord of the Rings legend McKellen, who is playing Gus the Theatre Cat, has spoken out in defence of Cats’ use of CGI, telling Entertainment Tonight: “The stage show, Cats, was not about a lot of people being convincing as cats, but it was about human beings discovering their cat-like nature. And it was hugely successful.
“When it was now being done in the film, the temptation I think must have been to turn those actors into cats, like Lion King, and make them look like real cats,” he continued. “But they’re not real cats. They’re people playing cats and that is the notion go the film.
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“And it’s been done very wittingly, I think, and particularly the dancers.”
The film is based on the musical of the same name by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which, in turn, was adapted from T.S. Elliot’s 1939 poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
The story is centre around a tribe of cats called the Jellicles who gather every year to compete to be chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer, their equivalent of Heaven, and be reborn.
Elba will be playing Macavity and Swift, Bombalurina.
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