Thank you! The recording of the original Bernadette Peters stage version of "Into the Woods" is far superior to the Hollywood version. I ADORE that musical and yet I can barely stand getting through the Disney one. Now bring me a proper recording of "Once on this Island"!
And to think that travesty came out on the same weekend as another cinematic trashfire, The Rise of Skywalker. Nearly four years later, and I'm still mad at myself for not walking out at the line "Somehow Palpatine returned."
The last movie I saw before the pandemic was Sonic the Hedgehog. That just renewed my love for the blue guy and actually made the pandemic seem slightly less crappy. And ironically, 2 years later, one of the Cats cast was in Sonic 2! (Well, his voice was.)
The Oscar bit was disgusting. Two rich actors making fun of an underfunded team trying to fix their horrible acting and another rich dude's terrible directing.
I wouldn't want to be the one trying to make James Cordon look good. I don't know why he's in everything, he can't sing or act and I don't think anyone actually likes him.
@@skylarjohnson7779 I don't know why Americans hate James Cordon so much lol, I (and I think most people in the UK) always saw him as a talented writer and comedic actor? Both Gavin and Stacey and One Man Two Guvnors received such rave reviews - have Americans never heard of them??
@@alexbennet4195 I'm british. I don't like him, I don't know anyone who likes him. Even among gavin and Stacy fans I don't think I've ever seen any praise specifically for him. Probably because the other stuff he's written was terrible and it leads me to guess it was Ruth Jones who made g&s so good.
@@alexbennet4195 I'm British, James Cordon is exceptionally obnoxious, as funny as a migraine and besides Fat Friends and Gavin & Stacey, everything else he's been in has been shite. Don't say that you think most people in the UK like him cos that's not true. Just say you like him. Don't assume others feel a certain way about someone just cos you do, especially not most of them! I haven't said most people in the UK hate him cos I don't need other people's opinions to make mine valid. (Even though I've literally not seen anyone online say they like him and people I know irl hate him too. Congrats, you're the first person I've seen to say that he's talented in any way whatsoever!)
Andrew Lloyd Webber trying to explain "Jellicle Cats" and "Pollicle Dogs" is like me trying to explain the intricacies of the lore of my favorite videogames.
@@branenchanter153 the host of my favorite movie podcast is doing livestreams of him watching movies during self-quarantine. The first two were Cats and the Gerard Butler disaster movie vehicle Geostorm so this video was perfect synergy
The words "manually rotoscoped fur" makes me feel so unbelievably sorry for those VFX artists who had to spend hours and hours doing that. It sounds like a ludicrous amount of work.
and to be so completely thrown under the bus when you could argue that the VFX were the best part (stylistic choices from everyone else notwithstanding), it makes me mad for them
Thing is, if you look at the fur alone and ignore the actor, it is pretty freaking good looking. Like the VFX team did a smashing job, but the what they were asked to do was doomed from the get go. Just slap human faces and body structure on cat fur, ears and tails. Throwing the VFX team under the bus was fucking low and I have no respect for anyone who green lit that little dig or the actors who participated in it.
Trading the actors' comfort for the animators' work load and then seeing the actors badmouth the result is just adding insult to injury. I wonder how this would have looked with practical effects.
i dont know who fucking invented that cgi is more realistic than practical effects, the makeup and fur in the musical look way more real, at least in a human, than any cgi could do, cgi is nice to cover props like cables and doing safe fire, if 90% of the movie is cgi just make it an animated movie
Especially seeing that vitriol come from Corden and Wilson, the two who were absolutely atrocious in the entire film - CGI or no. Part of that might be the script, but Christ, is Rebel Wilson’s improv unbearable.
Tiagorpg mendes there are plenty of AMAZING CGI effects that look realistic. It depends on the use and prep work and talent. Look at the Transformers from Michael Bay’s films. Trash films mostly but the visuals are pretty uniformly awesome. If you make CGI do ALL the work, there’ll be issues, and laziness/time constraints mean big-budget movies would rather throw extra money to do the purely computerized work instead of mixing the practical with the digital to make believable results.
Honestly the Lord of the Rings movies used practical effects(apart from mocap for gollem) and those movies still look freaking awesome. Much better than the Hobbit trilogy even though theres like 15 years between them.
@@TaliVarda100706 A lot of The Hobbit was dragged down by rushed production and the weird experiment with high framerate. You can definitely tell the places where they had time to finish the CGI, and the places they had to pull it out half-baked.
I'm sorry, what personally makes me angry is them blaming the vfx studio at the Oscar's. VFX studios are so often underpaid and overworked, forced to pay their animators out of pocket when a movie goes over budget. They are also beholden to whatever the director wants. The entire VFX industry is carrying the film industry on their backs and they're constantly disrespected at each turn. They deserve so much more than that.
VFX needs to unionize so goddamn badly. I've come to the realization that the very reason movies are a CGI hellscape these days is all down to the lack of unions. Examples: Disney's live action Pinocchio should have been a real puppet. AH, but Disney is in beef with the puppeteering union right now. That same movie should have had an actual cat for Geppettos kitten. AH, but animal handlers are unionized. It goes on and on. They basically funneled every role onto the shoulders of the exploitable CGI teams. Props, makeup, animals, stunts, etc.
yeah this. the vfx look terrible but this is a big hollywood production with a budget, they wouldn't have hired people who were bad at their jobs. so if it looks terrible, it's probably not their fault.
I don't work in Animation, but I do a creative job that takes a lot of work, not as much slaving as animation tbh. In my industry, architecture, we charge the client and restructure the agreed budget every time they come back with new things they want to add that fall outside the agreed scope of the project. And we generally agree on MOST of the details before construction starts. As far as I can tell, in animation they just expect them to throw out dozens of hours of work on a whim if the director (or execs) wants to rewrite a scene. And they are so cheap they can't work out the story and concepts ahead of time with the whole creative team and then animate, it's Go Go Go all the time so they are forced to create scenes on the fly as its being acted, edited, etc. Sounds like creative hell.
The general rule of thumb is if you see actors, directors, etc. blaming the VFX team for how bad the movie was received, then it is safe to assume that every single aspect of the film is garbage, and they’re just looking for a scapegoat.
He wanted to make a movie based on a musical about talking, singing, magical cats to be grounded and not very fantastical..... I have several questions...
it's the same bizzaro reasoning as making the lion king that "photorealistic", bland, no-fun-allowed, sfx mess. Like just because it's "realistic" doesn't mean you can't make it actually appealing to watch.
Coming soon to a theater near you, Tom Hooper's Lord of the Rings. He may have taken some creative liberties like taking out the magic, the ring, elves, hobbits, orcs, dwarves, and charm, but he does so to make a more grounded, realistic take on the tale.
I second that. The fact that Hollywood thinks Cooper is a good choice for musicals, is one the great wonders of the world. On second thought, I suppose it has something to do with money.
@@hattie_burns I watched it and felt not only bad for the original, but wishing that this movie wasn't people's first introduction to a production with actually pretty nice music (well, specifically Memory)
It's from an unpublished poem by Eliot entitled "Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats". The name "Jellicle cat" is derived from an attempt by T.S. Eliot's infant niece to say "dear little cat", where "Pollicle dogs" is a corruption of "poor little dogs".
@@Queen_Cnidarianexactly I don’t know what kinda drugs that guy was on to look at this fever dream of a show and try to make it realistic And he absolutely failed I love this musical btw it’s one of my favorites and I cried when I watched how he absolutely destroyed it😢
I once saw a comment that said “the whole point of Cats the musical is that it has entertaining songs with very good dancing, so when you take a bunch of mediocre dancers at best, you’re not gonna end up with Cats” and i think about that a lot.
@theyungcity23 lmao i havent seen the movie cause i don’t want to subject myself to that torture, so i don’t actually know; that’s why i said someone else said it because i am unaware
The dancers are great, the problem is Tom Hooper didn't film (I don't even know if he could, its so far from his style and what he was going for) a dance movie. He made some good dancers performing well look weird with shot composition, gritty realism and DigitalFurTechnology™
@@WhiteVioletButterfly I was gonna say, even as someone who's never seen the show, she and... actually, the show in general looks far more amiable. Rum Tum Tugger and Mestophicles seem to have a fondly, ahem, catty thing going on, the grey cat and Jenny seem to like each other, but the film cats seem outright nasty to one another. Does the cats introducing one another change the tone? So it's not "I'm the best", they're nominating one another for the most part?
Cats uses... manual animation... and not mo-cap... in 2019, with a crunched budget and deadline. The VFX team deserve a friggin medal for what they turned out.
Yeah, that shocked me! I originally thought, "Man, we have so much technology today, and that's the best they could do?" (I mean, I don't know much about CGI, but there is a certain amount of quality expected from a big-budget film.) But then, finding out they did it manually? Oof.
@@songofshadow5043 The best way I can describe it is this: imagine ordering a construction crew to build a skyscraper in half the time... without cranes
@@ceresta1732 That is incredibly apt. Better might be to include the fact that they can build elevators (custom tools), but those are hard without everything else basically already being there.
So fun story: my dad (ride or die for Cats) and I (introduced to Cats at age 7 by my dad who is NOT a theatre person but saw it twice before I was even conceived and am also a ride or die for Cats) went to go see this movie in theaters. I had seen the trailers and knew what was up, Dad hadn't. After the movie I turned to my Dad and went 'so... What'd you think?" He looked me dead in the eyes and went 'I don't know what the HELL that was but it wasn't Cats' and honestly? That's my 'Hal, it's about Cats'
I showed my mom the Sideways video, and she basically did the same thing. Dead eyes and saying "they keep ruining things i love". (She is also a classic Voltron fan who felt betrayed by the mess of the Legendary Defender show.) Oh mom, you don't deserve this.
@@kdnxnhdhdbfn2769 I know musical fans have pushed for it for literally years/decades, but it really just goes to show why musicals just need to release live recordings of the Broadway/stage shows. Broadway's logic of 'if we release it on film no one will see the show' is ass backwards--if you're the kind of person who loves live Broadway shows, a recorded version won't stop you if the means/opportunity to see a show comes up, but SO MANY PEOPLE never get the opportunity while really wanting to see the show and are willing to pay at least *some* money for it. I'd go so far as to say a production company/conglomerate of theatres could release their own streaming service of live broadway recordings and make money hand over fist in subscriptions.
Kdnxn Hdhdbfn yeah but honestly a bootleg will always be a much better alternative to the mutant Frankenstein’s monster that is the Tom Hooper style of musical. Once you utterly change the staging to adapt it to film, it’s already going to be fairly different, and while it can be done well, the point is that when the adaptation sets out with awards in mind foremost it’s going to completely lose sight of the spirit of the original, because the go to Oscar bait style doesn’t work with the elevated reality inherent to most stage musicals
@@Scorpia161 I don't really know why CATS didn't convince Broadway how ass-backwards that was in 1998 when they released a VHS of the Broadway stage production and it went 18x platinum in the UK _alone._
Tim Rice, in 2002: "I'm often asked why Andrew and I broke up. Well, would you want to work with someone who wanted 75 percent of the credit? And 75 percent of the money? And who chased after the leading lady in every show? Neither did Andrew."
I started my period while watching Cats in theaters, and when the cramps started, it felt more like my body was physically rejecting what my eyes were taking in. I just became double uncomfortable.
If t.s. elliot's wife never wanted the cats poems turned into an animated film because she was worried it would turn out like winnie the poo, then imagine what she'd think if she saw the cats film.
I guess like most of the authors when they see their work translated to a movie without guidance, blame the studio and say that the original work is way better (most of the time with a good reason)
I feel like TS Elliot's wif was worried that the poems would become "kid's stuff", because beside americanize Winnie the Pooh, they turned it into something that's unmistakably for kids. And yes, both the poems and Pooh were made with children in mind, but they weren't just for children. Either that or the Walt Disney-P.L. Travers debacle still had a rippling effect on how authors in general act when approached by Disney or any big hollywood studio.
Andrew Lloyd Webber: Wanted make a musical based on poems he loved as a child, personally talked with the author's widow to find the medium that best suited the poems, mortgaged his house, and risked everything for his dream. Tom Hooper: Wanted to make it for an Oscar, didn't know anything about VFX, verbally abused and overworked the VFX team, didn't even know what catnip was. Hmmm.
It wasn’t entirely the director’s fault. Mostly Universal and the producers and whoever came up with the idea to make a movie out of this in the first place.
Indeed, one of these things is not like the other (also apparently during the premiere of the movie apparently Lloyd Webber left half way through the movie looking defeated)
I don't understand why Hollywood keeps picking genres and movies to resurrect (Like Star Trek, Star Wars, and now musicals), and then picks a director who pretty much hates everything about that particular genre or universe. Like, what's the point??
Blaming the VFX artists is such a cop out. The artists only will make what the director approves of. The director looked at the designs and said “that’s what I want to show people.” As a character designer, the reason the designs look so awful is because the bizarre designs of the characters don’t have any stylization or flare. The desire to make them realistic makes them look gross and unsettling in their anatomy. The dramatic costumes in the original musical allowed for free movement but still had the idea of hinting that they were cats. I feel so bad for the artists that were underpaid and not given the ability to give any meaningful designs due to the lack of budget and foresight. The idea of making Cats of all plays more realistic is laughable, especially because using so much CGI and adding on every effect in post took more effort and looks more terrible than if they had just designed the costumes.
I remember when Jennifer Hudson was singing Memory at the end, I just wanted to grip her shoulders and say, "Jen. It's not worth it. God bless you, but this just isn't worth the effort."
“Honey you’re putting in way too much heart and soul into a production that doesn’t care at all. Gonna need you to bring it down to about a 4, maybe a 5.”
Fun fact: a friend of my partner actually worked on the stunts for cats, and he had to convince the production team that the actors couldn't 'land like cats' (on the palms of their hands) they would obliterate their wrists. Cats, but make it realism.
Cats are probably one of the worst animals to try to replicate realistically. Like have they ever seen how a cat acts and what they can do? How is a human supposed to replicate that without a) looking like a pervert, which is what we got here, and b) potentially harming themselves.
Also, if you were to consider that cats are digigrade (pretty much, they walk and put their weight on the equivalent of our fingers/toes).........*ouch*
Coming from a background in both Musical Theater _and_ Martial Arts, I've lost track of how many times I've heard instructors say, "If you're going to the ground, don't try to catch yourself. Just do your best to protect your head and spine." I learned that lesson the hard way, twenty years ago, when I dislocated _and_ broke a finger on a relatively light take-down. Our brain, thumbs, and larynx are why our species is successful, not our ability to absorb impact.
It's a shame, because he really is a good FILMmaker. The King's Speech was a fantastic fuckin movie. But his attempts at musicals were such disasters, and he treated them like such masterpieces, that they just ruined his reputation.
I am of the opinion that the original Cats worked so well because they looked at the story asked "Why not?" while the new movie looked at the story and went "Why?"
This demon video will not leave my recommendations. Every single thing I watch, Cat-Elba is staring at me and I know what it means to be in hell. If I leave on autoplay for too long I come back and find myself staring at writhing cat-human bodies. "I watched it already," I say to the uncaring heavens. "Did you like it?" say the Gods. "I did, I did! But please, let me leave!" There is nothing in heaven but laughter, and - from a distance, carried on the wind - 'Macavityyyyyyyy'
don bluths style would have worked SO WELL for it too, ik they didnt want it to be like a disney movie but don bluth is pretty good at making these dark stylized animated movies about animals (like secret of nimh) he could have made such a cool animated Cats film
@@BlisaBLisa OMG! YES!!!!! I could see him actually filming live performers doing the dance numbers and using that to Rotoscope for some of the parts and Macavity would have been a proper villain like Dragon from Nimh.
@@sudanemamimikiki1527 Check out Sideways video on Cats. Ian McKellan is speak-singing to no music. There was a piano player on set that had to follow what he was doing. So he's basically reciting a poem with no consistent rhythm and then they had to try to score the music around him.
watching Webber explain to that poor woman that “all cats are jellicle” and her completely bewildered expression had me laughing so hard I missed the next 30 seconds of the video
Genuinely, I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned them changing Macavity's colors. I wouldn't accuse it of being outright racist but its so bizarre to make the black guy's cat brown when it's not even close in color to the cat he is portraying. He's straight up described in his song as ginger. In the musical he has a cool crazy flame-like coloration that's my favorite design by far. Just weird. It looks like he's naked!! Even more so than everyone else!
Tall, slim, and ginger you say? Yeah, Idris Elba was the first actor that came to mind for me, didn't for you? Knuckles is the closest Idris Elba will get to a theater accurate Macavity
This! While Elba's, uh, fur colour wasn't as jarring as Lindsay seemed to think - it is somewhere between British Shorthair chocolate and a brown Burmese - it's still decidedly NOT a colour that Macavity has to be!
Oh wow I thought the cover photo was a photoshopped troll thing but nope.... that's actually from the movie. Gosh it's like from a horror film. Also he really does look naked
"I want the movie to be grounded and not that fantastical" ... it's Cats. CATS. You want a movie musical about anthropomorphic cats that sing and dance to be NOT fatastical?????
Rikusgirl001 This is my biggest lament as well. What is Tom Hooper’s obsession with making everything “grounded”? He was completely the wrong choice to direct this. But of course, he won Les Mis a few Oscars so Universal thought he could just do it again with Cats.
kshamwhizzle At least Baz Luhrman would understand the fantastical nature of a musical. I’m not saying Moulin Rogue is a masterpiece, but it’s so stylised and so out there it doesn’t really make you question the fact that everyone is singing. This is just the way this world works. Something like that for Cats would have been great (personally, I think an animated adaptation is the way to go) but Universal really wanted those Oscars though.
I also just learned that they did get memory totally wrong, too. Grisabella gets never touched as symbolism how she isn't a gelical cat anymore. She just wants to belong again and she's so lonely. At the end she almost gives up but then really goes off in memory and begs someone to touch her so she can belong to the gelical cats again. And then Viktoria touches her finally and noone steps in and she belongs again and it's so emotional.... but in the FILM she gets touched by viktoria and then AFTER that sings "touch me, it's so easy to leave me"...like...she already touched you so what is the point???
And in a previous scene, she shied away from Victoria's touch too. In the musical, Grisabella is desperate to be touched, to belong, but in the movie Victoria reaches for her and she shies away. They just Didn't Get It
@@ashikjaman1940 I've watched that video ten times in the past week. It's telling that Lindsay, at 47:55, says that Jennifer's part is great and even specifically calls out the "arrangement and mixing" being "so good", but after Sideways points out what's wrong in that scene I can't un-hear how it actually is messed up.
The movie mostly casted actors, singers, and dancers. They didn’t cast triple threats, they cast dancers who couldn’t really sing or act, actors who couldn’t really dance or sing, and singers who couldn’t really act or dance.
Exactly, the short answer to this whole issue is that Hollywood should have given this to the gays! You need the most extra, triple threats to make something this ridiculous work. You can't manufacture camp! I'm kidding but I really think the production was way too stiff and by-the-numbers. Edit: words.
Ok, I'd give Derulo dancing and singing, if only because he's at least competent. Not great, but competent. Acting for him... ehhhhhhhhh... EHHHHHHHHHHHHH...
I feel so cheated. In his first Doctor Who episode, he was actually quasi-endearing (and got head-butted by Matt Smith's Great Wall of Forehead... seriously, the show jokes his Doctor inspired the Easter Island Statues.) I guess it's like a potent spice; best in small doses.
@@Eviltwin531 His second Who outing was beyond terrible. "I speak baby" Nothing can stop the cybermanisation process, oops I was wrong, the wuv he has for his kid can, what a load of bollocks
Broadway is really failing itself by not adapting to the streaming world. The people they want to pay to see musicals will still do it. Just seems stupid to throw away the extra money, THEY TOTALLY DO WANT, out of the people who will never be able to see, or afford to see, them live. Even more so in the time of our lord covid, where they aren't making THE MONEY THEY WANT out of anyone.
Oh goodness a movie sounds... purely awful It is not a musical designed to work on screen (not that many are but some could work and this is notttt one of them) But yessssssss proshot pleaseeee
The VFX team didn't deserve to suffer for this. The fur actually looks realistic, and it wasn't their fault the director kept changing his mind every few days. This discordant disaster was already set in stone the moment they decided to make the movie "realistic". What a waste of effort.
Rendering realistic fur or hair is *hard*. Maui spent most of his time with his hair tied back in Moana because they didn't have the budget to animate free-flowing hair for the full movie. Rendering fur is computationally intensive, which is a fancy way of saying that you set everything up the way you think is right, hit "render", come back a few hours or days later, and see what you got. If the result isn't right, you start the process again. I get anxious just thinking about trying to do that on a tight schedule.
I agree; I thought they were wearing stupid expensive suits until someone told me it was animated. It's not the VFX teams fault that the designs rolled down the uncanny valley and hit every rock on the way down.
The fur being realistic is a different movie, there was never anything wrong with the costumes in the first place for over two decades. If you're going to change 80% of the visuals, because it's not "modern enough", you better think of something more original than incomplete mocap.
""I wanted to make this film grounded and realistic, so I took all of the allegorically themed sets from the stage show, and adapted them into their literal analogues." -- Tom Hooper, the man who turned Heaven into a hot-air balloon.
Some people don't have the capacity for abstract thought. Their brains just can't easily process it. Similar to how some people have aphantasia and can't think with images.
Freedom for None - Uroboro Djinn true but I think Hooper has a slight lack of understanding concept musicals, which are hard to transfer to film anyway. So if you are trying to make something grounded out of something very artistic, you lose the point it’s trying to make. Imagine taking the film Suspiria or 2001 Space Odyssey and put them Onstage with full plots so there can be two acts without understanding the visual storytelling they show without dialogue...
It seemed like he missed the most important part of the Grizabella plot, which wasn't "winning the big Heaven Prize", but being accepted and making an emotional connection after being lonely for so long. The Heaven Prize is only important to the plot because it symbolizes that the other cats have accepted her.
"I wanted to make this film grounded and realistic, so I had one my main characters shed her skin like a jacket and dance around in a circus ringmaster's suit." - Tom Hooper, the man who clearly has never known a single cat.
If you’re wondering who likes the stage show - dancers! I was a pretty serious ballet dancer through high school and loved the stage show because of the dancing, the physicality and atheticism of the actors is so fun to watch, especially when most broadway musicals don’t have that intricate choreography
I was a member of my high school's Thespian Club, and we made going to see CATS when it came to our city an official club event so our teacher could get score us group rate tickets. We still had to pay for our own tickets, but we gave our money to her and she bought them. We all were obsessed with CATS, and when I changed schools my senior year, I went into Competitive Speaking and interpretation of the original poems was so overdone, but we didn't care. The judges hated us all doing CATS poems though, I'm sure. Haha.
I once said that Cats is the best way for dancers, makeup artists, and art designers to show off their technical skills. Also I just love Cats, it’s dumb but it’s fun (as long as we leave out Growltiger and the thing about the Pekingese in Pekes and Pollicals...)
Hit that nail on the head (Also, from some reports during the premier of the “movie” apparently Andrew Lloyd Webber left the theater half way through the monstrosity(which I don’t blame him)
@@TrueBuddhaCat Interviewer: So how does it feel to have your most well-known musical be bastardized into a sea of uncanny valley? ALW:.............feels great.
I cannot believe they made Macavity unscary. I was genuinely terrified of him as a kid, and now he says his own name like a Pokémon whilst vanishing using magic? Also it’s literally in the lyrics that he’s ginger what the hell
We were made to perform cats in high school PE. I was an insecure, developing teenager made to perform in a skintight leotard, in front of the whole year. The movie adaptation is worse than that memory.
@@cara_h_4 Seriously! It would make slightly more sense if it was a drama class, but PE? I'm thinking that teacher just wanted an excuse to see some developing teenagers wearing skin tight leotards. Many props to the OP for enduring that, I probably would've ended up getting myself expelled.
@Laura Martin-Falla unzipping your skintight fur to reveal identical skintight fur is WAY creepier than revealing a fun flapper cat (dripping actual beads) concealed under a very VERY stylized accordion-esque body. Play Jennyanydots shows up onstage not looking like the other cats, and she looks like them when she reveals her nighttime persona. Movie Jennyanydots has a ZIPPER IN HER SKIN
@Laura Martin-Falla Yeah the roach eating was the part that made me feel physically uncomfortable. Not so much that she does it. It's that she does it MULTIPLE times. One time, done quick with everything else going on, you can kinda blink and go "well I guess that happened" and not think about it. Doing it multiple times doesn't allow for that.
I love how they're like, "oh yeah we were running in to the set with the song JUST finished" like that's somehow a good story and NOT a sign of being seriously underprepared.
I agree with you too an extent...you gotta understand the artistic process for songwriting in particular is not streamlined, while movoe making is down to a science at this point...trying to slow down a film to get music just right is like slowing a fraight train.
I feel like you get ONE story like that per production, max-- either they finish the song last minute, or they finish the effects last minute, but not both. And ofc it's only something you admit if the end product is good!!!
So if I'm understanding the Guy Fieri reference at the beginning correctly: Fieri was a guy that critics loved to dunk on in the past, but he's now someone people generally are cool with because he's always been himself, enjoyed it, and never intended to be the "high art" of the food world and people love that. But where Cats the stage show was largely the same, Cats the movie really wanted to be taken seriously (even though it was never designed to be) and failed miserably at it. Is that right?
It's as if instead of making his restaurant a Manhattan tourist trap Guy Fieri had marketed it as Haute cuisine with little to no changes to the menu and expected to be taken seriously. Just imagine: candle lit dining room, $200 bottles of wine, and a plate of trash can nachos.
That's how it seems. Guy Fieri gets dunked on but he is genuine to his craft, and there are people that appreciate his craft. Instead of adapting Cats the way it would make more sense to for a film screen, they tried to adapt it to appease the critics of Hollywood, and thought doing so could get it to an Oscar win. Except, Cats won it's awards as a stage musical in spite of the hate critics gave it, and because they tried to appease Hollywood critics from the onset, they already were doomed to disaster because they missed the point entirely.
Balto is a great movie, I super loved it as a kid and I still do now. But it was unfortunately a box office failure. It does not help that it came out in the same year as Toy Story.
@@fuyutupx1437 Disney was back in full swing in the 90's. Competitors in animation at that time had no chance. That era wasn't called "The Disney Renaissance" for nothing.
You can even see the actor playing Munkustrap looking at Dench keep going being like “For the love of god, are we still going on!? Tom, yell cut already!!”
I just absolutely love how Idris shows up and goes "mccavity!" It's...just so funny? And I feel like it wasn't entirely meant to be. But I laugh every time
I'm so glad the me that tought "weren't mistoffelees and tugger gay for each other?" wasn't just me REALLY reading into the subtext and it was actually Hooper not wanting gay cats on screen lmao
And it combined the best of two shitty worlds: by playing around with the plot they no homo'ed two romantically ambiguous(or not that ambiguous, did you see that rainbow ribbon thing, lol) cats and since Victoria is a female MC now, god forbid we would have a female protagonist without a romantic subplot. Gotta intrest the chicks, you know. And who is better to slide into the role of romantic interest, than a romantically ambiguous cat. Isn't that ingenious? Killed two birds with one shit flip of that script.
Seriously. I mean, everything in Cats can be interpreted pretty much anyway you want. But Hollywood talks a big game about Equity and Diversity etc. ,etc. but they won't ever bring "gay subtext" into the spotlight because Money. They are such hypocrites.
What’s ironic is that women will throw money at people for a (well done) gay romance. Just make it hot and steamy and you can just print money. The issue is that too many of the big het stars are (kinda justifiably) worried about being typecasted and there is a “no homo” aspect to how they feel that most directors tend not to bother with getting rid of. All the more props to Ledger and Gyllenhal for committing almost two decades ago.
I'm really disappointed in James Cordon for that "joke." Those poor visual effects artists only did what they were told to do by the stubborn director. They probably worked their asses off... Edit: holy crap, thanks for the likes guys, if you're reading this Lindsay you're awesome, a great LGBT ally and I love your stuff.
@@MintyDragonfly As an American I can tell you my country finds European accents classy and boarder line fetish fuel expecially English and French accents. You don't know how painful it is growing up with kids trying to sound English to look "cute" or "sophisticated" because of HP.
It doesn't help that these are kinda bad times for VFX studios- they're in demand but they have to lowball their bids to get contracts, so they're all underpaid, the artists are pretty much all nonunion (which is also *why* movies increasingly use CG for things that could be done practically, because makeup artists and costume designers *do* have unions), and it's pretty common for them to go bankrupt just because they're not getting enough money to do the work they do. Like, the studio that worked overtime to redesign Sonic after the first trailers? They're gone now.
I think the "why" of "Cats" on stage is really a "for the artz" situation in a true "the medium is the message" fashion. The point of cats is its musicality, its poetics, for stage. It's not a stage version of a novel, it's a stage version of a poem. Not even a classical poem like it was adapted from, either, but the stage version of new-age poetry where the point is less what the poem is saying and more what the poem sounds and looks and feels like as an object in itself. I think it's truly a musical that doesn't work to change the medium because its medium is its whole point.
Nah. Cats is pretty much a softcore furry porn, it's that plain and simple. And don't get me wrong, I'm not judging, people can like and do whatever they like, I don't care. But to pretend that Cats, both the original and the new movie is some form of expression of art is just nonsense justification of some people's liking for a furry content in a sexual sense. Like I said, you like furries, that's fine.
"Instead of putting a cat suit on the actors, we're going to put a big, baggy, uncomfortable suit on them and have the animators animate both naked, human-shaped fur figures (on some of the cats) and human-shaped fur figures WEARING COATS (on others) after the fact." Did Tom Hooper just hate the effects team?
Definitely. He's a big, wealthy, oscar-winning artist and they're just a bunch of computer geeks. He already very obviously thinks he's too good for the concept of musicals; I can't imagine employees whose names no one even knows outrank his lunch.
Ironically the Les Mis cast was treated so stupidly where the actors nearly wrecked themselves with singing full blast for hours and pushing Anne Hathaway and High Jackman into really unhealthy diets for aesthetics
but thats the thing: all this bts shows the talent all in mocap so I'm confused... did they film them in mocap then tom stood behind the vfx artists while they worked and said "you better not use this time- and labor-saving tool that I'm giving you and do everything from scratch! i mean it!!" that's what everyone is making to seem like including him but i think its more likely that the people saying this just don't know what mocap is
I hate the internet for running Lindsay away from youtube, I miss her video essays like crazy. She didn't need the aggravation and we clearly didn't deserve her. Glad she's doing just fine.
I'm impressed that Cats became such a big deal in the 80s that they had the cast make advertisements against smoking and telling parents "put seatbelts on your kids so they don't die"
I never did see Cats, but I did see Starlight Express back in the day. Cats didn’t seem so weird after seeing a bunch of roller skating anthropomorphic train cars.
Ok, but have you seen him in One Man, Two Guvnors? (it's live on National Theatre's YT channel right now) He's not my *favorite* thing about the production, but it is a strong performance.
Idris Elba got Covid-19 after this movie. I'm betting he survived it because God took pity on him for being in this movie, so he prevented him from dying just so that he could star in better films. Imagine this movie being your final big screen appearance, it would be the definition of adding insult to injury.
@@LucyLioness100 Daniel Dae Kim was in that horrible Hellboy reboot and he got the virus as well (but he survived too). I wish that Hellboy 2019 got the same reputation as this film, it was just as much of an unmitigated disaster.
So, from what I am getting is: 1) Tom Hooper is a terrible musical director who thirsts for Oscars 2) Unless you have an actually good idea how to adapt a work between mediums, don't bother 3) All-Star Casts do not make a good work, as usual (especially if they have no other talent to supplement it - at this case, actual singing and dancing skills) 4) Musicals in films are better done animated form 5) Cats are not dogs
Anonymous Mind #4 disagree, will shout out little shop again. (Thank you Frank Oz, Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene and Steve Martin! Forever and ever!!! What wonderful work!) edited: and the rest of the cast too, I just typed this comment in the fly. EVERYONE (the Ronettes specifically, since they sing the ENTIRE show) killed it in this movie. The production team too. Someone remake this now, please! And don’t digitalize Audrey II!
"Cats confirms for people who hate musicals why they hate musicals." This probably nails so well what I felt about Cats. Also, about your conclusion; I would watch a Cats film adaptation if it were just the audio from the stage show overlayed onto footage of actual cats doing cat things.
What I don't understand is why they never stayed on tone with any decision, the biggest being no costumes: Ok, no costumes, because you want them to be cat people instead of envisioning them as just flamboyant stylish cats like in Broadway.... But then you have them wear coats and heels on top of their CGI bodies... Thus adding flamboyancy and style... -_-
i literally screamed "HE'S NAKED" when macavity, who had up until that point been wearing a coat, showed up without one. i went and saw it on christmas with my boyfriend (who will probably watch this video shortly as well) we're both cats fans and we were in TEARS we couldn't stop laughing or clowning about it for weeks, i genuinely LOVED it, it was SUCH an abomination against god. i gotta say jennifer hudson singing memory genuinely gave me chills and made me tear up in the theatre tho
It's like Dan Olsen in Folding Ideas noted. When you first see the naked cats it doesn't really click because like it's CGI fur, but then comes Macavity wearing his coat. Then he LOSES the coat, you think "Oh shit, he's naked", and suddenly it's like the blinders have been removed, and you realize "Oh shit, *all the cats are naked*..."
Listening to this in 2021 and boy did it feel prophetic. In the category of Terrible Movie Musical Adaptation, I present to you 2021's _Dear Evan Hansen!_ It has it all: 1. A movie musical that is clearly uncomfortable with any and all musical aspects. 2. A director with Oscar ambitions taking a fairly abstract dark comedy and turning it into a gritty realistic funeral dirge so the Academy will take him seriously. 3. An original song that no one asked for that grinds the story to a halt and adds nothing to the narrative. It's even got some of your favorite stuff from Lindsey's other videos! Such as... - An original Broadway cast member reprising his role despite _clearly_ being too old to believably play the character now, in a show where the main character's youth is _very important to stress._ (ala RENT) - Transparently cynical and half-hearted attempts to address criticisms of the original story that do not actually engage with those criticisms in any meaningful way, and actively detract from the story. (ala the Beauty and the Beast remake) I feel like there should be a bingo card we fill out every time these things get released. Because, unfortunately, it looks like they're going to keep coming.
@@arambles1 i feel like matilda had a good starting point though, it's a children's story, and also magical enough to not expect realism but set in mostly reality so you don't get whatever the fuck cats ist
The "Why?" of the musical is simple, it evokes all of the personalities that cat-owners perceive in their felines. That's what is at the heart of the poems, and at the heart of the musical. It's also why the ridiculous costumes and the anthropomorphism work in the musical; cat-owners already perceive a "person" in their pet and the musical just registers that fact in an enhanced key that works perfectly with a heightened sense of absurdity, whimsy, etc. It's very similar to Kayfabe; cat-owners KNOW that their cats aren't people, but they play as if they are. Musical captures that right in a bottle. The movie, on the hand, takes the Cats-Kayfabe as literal and basically presents the viewer not with human personalities dressed up as cats, but with literal cat-human hybrids. It kills everything and generates an instant "yeck" response.
Exactly! As a passionate cat owner I just see cats. I've been listening to the songs for a couple of days now and that's exactly what I love about them. It's about cats. If you ignore what's happening on stage, then it's just cats. I can recognize my own pets, I swear my brother's cat is a little Rum Tum Tugger in a sense that he wants whatever he can't get and gets stuck in furniture. I adore how Mr Mistoffelees' song is about how magic he is, but describes how it's undeniably proven just because someone heard a cat purr when he wasn't there. Or Skimbleshanks explaining how he's in charge of the entire train. That's what cats are fundamentally, they're little self-important fur balls. And the musical is just that with a little dramatical subplot to tie it together.
Actually, you're not wrong on this. Mamrie Heart said on her podcast that one of the best things to look for when traveling in a foreign country is either puppet shows, other media targeted towards children, or a stage show/musical that you are already familiar with. That way, you don't need to even know the language to follow what's happening. Something being simple doesn't automatically mean it's bad.
@@wickedphant0m you can even find it in the lyrics! For example, tugger is supposed to be the kind of cat who thinks he's so amazing but in his song he fully admits that he gets stuck in drawers on the regular. Just like any spoiled beloved house cat. Or skimble who is just a cat that lives at a train station, so when the conductors are looking for him before they depart it makes him think that he *literally* is the driving force of the trains and that they physically can't leave without them. It's all goofy regular cat attitudes hidden under flair and glitter because that is exactly how they view themselves from their pov lolol
@@Falicity345 No he's talking about Memory. When she sings "it's so easy to leave me", you can hear the orchestra hesitate so they can time the next chord with her singing. Sideways goes into more detail in his video which I defiantly recommend.
The uncanny Macavity Is Human Skin Colour thing could've been so easily fixed by, I don't know, maybe reading the lyrics of the song he shares the name of? That has a whole verse describing his appearance? I don't know, I'm just spitballing here.
When I watched this movie a few months ago, I had my cat sleeping in the room next to me, and when Memory started playing, she woke up, *watched the movie* (and she's never found interest in tv at all), then after the song, she went back to sleep. I think that was her equivalent of a standing ovation honestly
I’m guessing your cat was like “Wait! I hear the sweet music of my people by the voice of an angel” then once it was over your cat probably went “oh, it’s over; back to sleep then, weird abominations of nature” (Also, kinda of a funny and embarrassing story that my mom shared with me is that when she and my dad were getting prepared to be married, one of the songs my mom wanted to used during the party after the wedding was; no joke; “Memory”; and the poor wedding planner just looked at my mom in surprise and bewilderment by telling her “But why?”, my mom explained that she loved the song and the planner agreed that the song is beautiful but then said “You do know that the cat is singing about dying, right?”; and there was this awkward pause from my mom and she was like “Oh.....I did not know that” So yeah, my mom learned what “Memory” was really about and shared this hilarious/embarrassing story)
“I’m losin’ to a bird!” walked so “Hal, it’s about cats” could run
"See how I glitter" also walked so "I'm losin to a bird" could run.
carrey “I ate the WHOLE plate, the WHOLE PLATE!”
DONT YOU DARE FORGET 'SEE HOW I GLITTER' AND 'FAIRY LIVES DONT MATTER TODAY'
And of course the honorable mention of 'Because it was real'
Let us not forget: "I got a fur wedgie"
If you go way back, you also can't forget about "Ursula's crazy sister!"
Theater People don't want big Hollywood adaptations, Theater People want hi-def filmed from the stage videos.
All us CATS fans really want is for the 1998 film to be remastered into proper 4k.
This. Like... Come on, we got an Elisabeth and Rudolf Affaire Mayerling recording before damned WICKED.
Virtual Reality versions would be best.
Thank you! The recording of the original Bernadette Peters stage version of "Into the Woods" is far superior to the Hollywood version. I ADORE that musical and yet I can barely stand getting through the Disney one. Now bring me a proper recording of "Once on this Island"!
Amen.
I don't know why everyone is saying Cats was bad.
They played it on my flight home and there were only two walkouts.
buh dum chh
You made me laugh. Thank you.
I nearly choked on my drink when I read this thank you for the laugh
Nice.
Well, that was....dark.
Just one furry... One furry on the design team could have prevented this monstrosity
My god you’re right.
We need to add more of them to films so this does NOT happen again!
🤔😳🤣
Honestly a revival of Cats using fursuits is really interesting and I'm not even a furry.
@@HaydenofEverything How do I dislike your comment multiple times?
Cats was the last movie I saw in theaters before the pandemic, and honestly, I can't think of a better way to say goodbye to society as we knew it.
And to think that travesty came out on the same weekend as another cinematic trashfire, The Rise of Skywalker. Nearly four years later, and I'm still mad at myself for not walking out at the line "Somehow Palpatine returned."
@@jbvader721lol, same. Honestly, the one good cinema thing that happened in 2019 was Knives Out.
@@arambles1 Knives Out was awesome! I saw that the same night I went to see TROS and boy oh boy did the latter ruin my day it was so bad.
me too
The last movie I saw before the pandemic was Sonic the Hedgehog. That just renewed my love for the blue guy and actually made the pandemic seem slightly less crappy.
And ironically, 2 years later, one of the Cats cast was in Sonic 2!
(Well, his voice was.)
The Oscar bit was disgusting. Two rich actors making fun of an underfunded team trying to fix their horrible acting and another rich dude's terrible directing.
I wouldn't want to be the one trying to make James Cordon look good. I don't know why he's in everything, he can't sing or act and I don't think anyone actually likes him.
@@skylarjohnson7779 I don't know why Americans hate James Cordon so much lol, I (and I think most people in the UK) always saw him as a talented writer and comedic actor? Both Gavin and Stacey and One Man Two Guvnors received such rave reviews - have Americans never heard of them??
@@alexbennet4195 I'm british. I don't like him, I don't know anyone who likes him. Even among gavin and Stacy fans I don't think I've ever seen any praise specifically for him. Probably because the other stuff he's written was terrible and it leads me to guess it was Ruth Jones who made g&s so good.
Don't forget that everyone who applauded that shitty joke is in a union.
@@alexbennet4195 I'm British, James Cordon is exceptionally obnoxious, as funny as a migraine and besides Fat Friends and Gavin & Stacey, everything else he's been in has been shite. Don't say that you think most people in the UK like him cos that's not true. Just say you like him. Don't assume others feel a certain way about someone just cos you do, especially not most of them! I haven't said most people in the UK hate him cos I don't need other people's opinions to make mine valid. (Even though I've literally not seen anyone online say they like him and people I know irl hate him too. Congrats, you're the first person I've seen to say that he's talented in any way whatsoever!)
A lesson expressed two different ways:
"It's a movie, not a stage show."
"A CAT IS NOT A DOG."
YEEEEEEESSSS
Lmao!
PuppetYeti Seeing how the Cats, mice and cockroaches turned out, do you think that offscreen dog had the face and limbs of a human, too?
@@DuelaDent52 I hadn't thought of that--thank goodness they didn't show us *shudder*
"Heterosexual cats" is by far my favorite musical number in the movie
Andrew Lloyd Webber trying to explain "Jellicle Cats" and "Pollicle Dogs" is like me trying to explain the intricacies of the lore of my favorite videogames.
"So then the Emperor and Horus fought- babe, can you listen please? This parts important. So anyway they were fighting..."
@@niallreid7664 you made me spit water XD omg
That was me trying to explain the plot of chainsaw man to my dad 😿
That was me trying to explain the lore of FNaF ;-;
"So he wasn't a soldier, but a member of a special fighting force called SOLDIER..."
“See how I glitter”
“I ate the whole plate”
And now “Hal it’s about cats”
i'm loosing to a bird!
*throws cards*
"Macavityyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"
“Darkness deep as HEeEEAaAuuGhLLLlLlLL”
@@branenchanter153 the host of my favorite movie podcast is doing livestreams of him watching movies during self-quarantine. The first two were Cats and the Gerard Butler disaster movie vehicle Geostorm so this video was perfect synergy
The words "manually rotoscoped fur" makes me feel so unbelievably sorry for those VFX artists who had to spend hours and hours doing that. It sounds like a ludicrous amount of work.
I know, right? It should be a criminal offense to make somebody do that work.
Best part is. They then make fun of the team when it looks bad
and to be so completely thrown under the bus when you could argue that the VFX were the best part (stylistic choices from everyone else notwithstanding), it makes me mad for them
Time for a VFX artists' strike I think
Thing is, if you look at the fur alone and ignore the actor, it is pretty freaking good looking. Like the VFX team did a smashing job, but the what they were asked to do was doomed from the get go. Just slap human faces and body structure on cat fur, ears and tails.
Throwing the VFX team under the bus was fucking low and I have no respect for anyone who green lit that little dig or the actors who participated in it.
Trading the actors' comfort for the animators' work load and then seeing the actors badmouth the result is just adding insult to injury.
I wonder how this would have looked with practical effects.
i dont know who fucking invented that cgi is more realistic than practical effects, the makeup and fur in the musical look way more real, at least in a human, than any cgi could do, cgi is nice to cover props like cables and doing safe fire, if 90% of the movie is cgi just make it an animated movie
Especially seeing that vitriol come from Corden and Wilson, the two who were absolutely atrocious in the entire film - CGI or no. Part of that might be the script, but Christ, is Rebel Wilson’s improv unbearable.
Tiagorpg mendes there are plenty of AMAZING CGI effects that look realistic. It depends on the use and prep work and talent. Look at the Transformers from Michael Bay’s films. Trash films mostly but the visuals are pretty uniformly awesome. If you make CGI do ALL the work, there’ll be issues, and laziness/time constraints mean big-budget movies would rather throw extra money to do the purely computerized work instead of mixing the practical with the digital to make believable results.
Honestly the Lord of the Rings movies used practical effects(apart from mocap for gollem) and those movies still look freaking awesome. Much better than the Hobbit trilogy even though theres like 15 years between them.
@@TaliVarda100706 A lot of The Hobbit was dragged down by rushed production and the weird experiment with high framerate. You can definitely tell the places where they had time to finish the CGI, and the places they had to pull it out half-baked.
I'm sorry, what personally makes me angry is them blaming the vfx studio at the Oscar's. VFX studios are so often underpaid and overworked, forced to pay their animators out of pocket when a movie goes over budget. They are also beholden to whatever the director wants. The entire VFX industry is carrying the film industry on their backs and they're constantly disrespected at each turn. They deserve so much more than that.
VFX teams need to go on strike.
VFX needs to unionize so goddamn badly. I've come to the realization that the very reason movies are a CGI hellscape these days is all down to the lack of unions. Examples: Disney's live action Pinocchio should have been a real puppet. AH, but Disney is in beef with the puppeteering union right now. That same movie should have had an actual cat for Geppettos kitten. AH, but animal handlers are unionized. It goes on and on. They basically funneled every role onto the shoulders of the exploitable CGI teams. Props, makeup, animals, stunts, etc.
yeah this. the vfx look terrible but this is a big hollywood production with a budget, they wouldn't have hired people who were bad at their jobs. so if it looks terrible, it's probably not their fault.
I don't work in Animation, but I do a creative job that takes a lot of work, not as much slaving as animation tbh. In my industry, architecture, we charge the client and restructure the agreed budget every time they come back with new things they want to add that fall outside the agreed scope of the project. And we generally agree on MOST of the details before construction starts.
As far as I can tell, in animation they just expect them to throw out dozens of hours of work on a whim if the director (or execs) wants to rewrite a scene. And they are so cheap they can't work out the story and concepts ahead of time with the whole creative team and then animate, it's Go Go Go all the time so they are forced to create scenes on the fly as its being acted, edited, etc. Sounds like creative hell.
The general rule of thumb is if you see actors, directors, etc. blaming the VFX team for how bad the movie was received, then it is safe to assume that every single aspect of the film is garbage, and they’re just looking for a scapegoat.
He wanted to make a movie based on a musical about talking, singing, magical cats to be grounded and not very fantastical..... I have several questions...
it's the same bizzaro reasoning as making the lion king that "photorealistic", bland, no-fun-allowed, sfx mess. Like just because it's "realistic" doesn't mean you can't make it actually appealing to watch.
@@SapphicFurry also, there was not one single second of cats 2019 that could possibly be described as "realistic" it's a fucking fever dream
Did this guy had a proper childhood?
Also, is about a cult...
Coming soon to a theater near you, Tom Hooper's Lord of the Rings. He may have taken some creative liberties like taking out the magic, the ring, elves, hobbits, orcs, dwarves, and charm, but he does so to make a more grounded, realistic take on the tale.
"Macavity's a ginger cat" is literally a line in his song.
You’ll love sideways’ new video
I second that. The fact that Hollywood thinks Cooper is a good choice for musicals, is one the great wonders of the world. On second thought, I suppose it has something to do with money.
@@hattie_burns I watched it and felt not only bad for the original, but wishing that this movie wasn't people's first introduction to a production with actually pretty nice music (well, specifically Memory)
The text of his poem also makes it clear he's a rather thin cat with greying fur.
@@StrayBats I always recommend the other version.
The video of Webber explaining deadly seriously that all cats are Jellicle and all dogs are Pollicle plays like a British mockumentary and I can't
He's wrong about the dogs, unsurprisingly. Pekes for instance aren't pollicles.
I'm obsessed with that clip!
@@alanpennie8013 I was so annoyed about that! Those poems were my childhood lmao
It's from an unpublished poem by Eliot entitled "Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats". The name "Jellicle cat" is derived from an attempt by T.S. Eliot's infant niece to say "dear little cat", where "Pollicle dogs" is a corruption of "poor little dogs".
Spinal Tap came to mind.
“hooper tried to ground this film in reality” and “rebel wilson eats children” are a horrifying combination
If you are trying to adapt a musical about cats singing about why they deserve to die, and are going for realisim, you are doing something wrong.
@@Queen_Cnidarianexactly
I don’t know what kinda drugs that guy was on to look at this fever dream of a show and try to make it realistic
And he absolutely failed
I love this musical btw it’s one of my favorites and I cried when I watched how he absolutely destroyed it😢
That's because Rebel Wilson eating children is society
Rebel Wilson did something a lot worse in this movie than eat children...she sang.
I once saw a comment that said “the whole point of Cats the musical is that it has entertaining songs with very good dancing, so when you take a bunch of mediocre dancers at best, you’re not gonna end up with Cats” and i think about that a lot.
Rebel Wilson eating cockroaches instead of tap dancing hurt me.
purplezombies5327 They has an incredible team of dancers. Steven McCrae, Francesca Hayward
@theyungcity23 lmao i havent seen the movie cause i don’t want to subject myself to that torture, so i don’t actually know; that’s why i said someone else said it because i am unaware
purplezombies5327 The dancers are amazing tho
The dancers are great, the problem is Tom Hooper didn't film (I don't even know if he could, its so far from his style and what he was going for) a dance movie. He made some good dancers performing well look weird with shot composition, gritty realism and DigitalFurTechnology™
Wilson and Cordon dissing VFX artists when they themselves are the most cringeworthy part of the movie is rich.
They deserve to be pilloried.
Wilson destroyed Jenny Anydots. She went from a happy gentle grandma to a miserable, clumsy, horrific bully.
The most underappreciated horror film of the year.
@@WhiteVioletButterfly I was gonna say, even as someone who's never seen the show, she and... actually, the show in general looks far more amiable. Rum Tum Tugger and Mestophicles seem to have a fondly, ahem, catty thing going on, the grey cat and Jenny seem to like each other, but the film cats seem outright nasty to one another.
Does the cats introducing one another change the tone? So it's not "I'm the best", they're nominating one another for the most part?
They definitely lost most of my respect with that stunt.
Cats uses... manual animation... and not mo-cap... in 2019, with a crunched budget and deadline. The VFX team deserve a friggin medal for what they turned out.
Also a huge apology and some compensation money for Tom Hooper and company throwing them under the bus when their movie flopped.
Yeah, that shocked me! I originally thought, "Man, we have so much technology today, and that's the best they could do?" (I mean, I don't know much about CGI, but there is a certain amount of quality expected from a big-budget film.) But then, finding out they did it manually? Oof.
@@songofshadow5043 The best way I can describe it is this: imagine ordering a construction crew to build a skyscraper in half the time... without cranes
@@ceresta1732 That is incredibly apt. Better might be to include the fact that they can build elevators (custom tools), but those are hard without everything else basically already being there.
Well that explains a lot
So fun story: my dad (ride or die for Cats) and I (introduced to Cats at age 7 by my dad who is NOT a theatre person but saw it twice before I was even conceived and am also a ride or die for Cats) went to go see this movie in theaters. I had seen the trailers and knew what was up, Dad hadn't. After the movie I turned to my Dad and went 'so... What'd you think?" He looked me dead in the eyes and went 'I don't know what the HELL that was but it wasn't Cats' and honestly? That's my 'Hal, it's about Cats'
I showed my mom the Sideways video, and she basically did the same thing. Dead eyes and saying "they keep ruining things i love". (She is also a classic Voltron fan who felt betrayed by the mess of the Legendary Defender show.) Oh mom, you don't deserve this.
I do feel “grounded” watching CATS. I feel as though I’ve done something wrong and am being punished for it.
Grounded in the same way a corpse in a shallow grave in the woods might feel grounded
I could see Tom Hooper using his fear of “Irish-face” as an excuse to why Idris looks like a naked, excessively hairy man
Cute pfp.
I was grounded for six months just for discussing seeing this film.
+
“Popular musicals being adapted to films because Oscar bait is a disease” damn Lindsay really went off at the end, and deservedly so
Withinashes to be fair adaptations are for most musical theatre enthusiasts the only way to legally see their favourite shows.
@@kdnxnhdhdbfn2769 I know musical fans have pushed for it for literally years/decades, but it really just goes to show why musicals just need to release live recordings of the Broadway/stage shows. Broadway's logic of 'if we release it on film no one will see the show' is ass backwards--if you're the kind of person who loves live Broadway shows, a recorded version won't stop you if the means/opportunity to see a show comes up, but SO MANY PEOPLE never get the opportunity while really wanting to see the show and are willing to pay at least *some* money for it. I'd go so far as to say a production company/conglomerate of theatres could release their own streaming service of live broadway recordings and make money hand over fist in subscriptions.
Kdnxn Hdhdbfn yeah but honestly a bootleg will always be a much better alternative to the mutant Frankenstein’s monster that is the Tom Hooper style of musical. Once you utterly change the staging to adapt it to film, it’s already going to be fairly different, and while it can be done well, the point is that when the adaptation sets out with awards in mind foremost it’s going to completely lose sight of the spirit of the original, because the go to Oscar bait style doesn’t work with the elevated reality inherent to most stage musicals
@@Scorpia161 I don't really know why CATS didn't convince Broadway how ass-backwards that was in 1998 when they released a VHS of the Broadway stage production and it went 18x platinum in the UK _alone._
It's a pretty shit musical though. The most overrated show ever.
"when musicals are good they're good, when they're bad they're horrid"
-Catherine Zeta-Jones
thank you for all the likes.
Amen brother.
Well, but it's true. Many movies can be below expectations and still work, bad musicals are usually unwatchable.
Did she really say this..? I hope she did - it's glorious, just like her.
@@obiwankenobi9141 I'll take your word for it - you seem knowledgeable... 🍻
Tim Rice, in 2002: "I'm often asked why Andrew and I broke up. Well, would you want to work with someone who wanted 75 percent of the credit? And 75 percent of the money? And who chased after the leading lady in every show? Neither did Andrew."
That's so fucking funny to me for some reason
So is Tim Rice saying that’s himself then?
@@1rockcrawfordI'd say yes. The "neither did Andrew" in that context is meant as a response to an implied response to the questions.
atleast he’s a good sport about it
@@JustKrinI believe it’s because it is a joke
"Hal...it's about cats.
And we never discussed it again"
Pure poetry
I mean would you?
Literally died laughing at that intro ngl
I loved that line because Andrew just seems so confused as to why Hal is looking for a deeper meaning
I wish Cats had died forever right there.
I started my period while watching Cats in theaters, and when the cramps started, it felt more like my body was physically rejecting what my eyes were taking in. I just became double uncomfortable.
Hannah That is some war story, lady. I'm not sure what to say but... Thanks for sharing. I think?
Damn. Respect. Thats some PTSD right there
I love the idea of a film being so bad it triggers someone's period.
Lmaooo The movie that destroys from the inside out
Ginger Snaps called periods "the curse" so by that logic, you could say Cats triggered the curse.
If t.s. elliot's wife never wanted the cats poems turned into an animated film because she was worried it would turn out like winnie the poo, then imagine what she'd think if she saw the cats film.
I guess like most of the authors when they see their work translated to a movie without guidance, blame the studio and say that the original work is way better (most of the time with a good reason)
I mean, "horny hieronymus bosch style nightmare" is about as far as you can get from "winnie the pooh"
Followed by the Winnie The Poo live action film? Consistant confusion and maybe concern, as well all should once in a while
I think technically it was a different t.s. Elliot property she was worried about but the point is still valid.
I feel like TS Elliot's wif was worried that the poems would become "kid's stuff", because beside americanize Winnie the Pooh, they turned it into something that's unmistakably for kids. And yes, both the poems and Pooh were made with children in mind, but they weren't just for children.
Either that or the Walt Disney-P.L. Travers debacle still had a rippling effect on how authors in general act when approached by Disney or any big hollywood studio.
Webber's face as he tries to explain "all cats are jellicle cats, fundamentally"... hilarious and adorable.
It's almost childlike, I don't know how to explain it.
He looks like he's willing to and absolutely would throw hands with anyone that says otherwise
Andrew Lloyd Webber: Wanted make a musical based on poems he loved as a child, personally talked with the author's widow to find the medium that best suited the poems, mortgaged his house, and risked everything for his dream.
Tom Hooper: Wanted to make it for an Oscar, didn't know anything about VFX, verbally abused and overworked the VFX team, didn't even know what catnip was.
Hmmm.
If Tom Hooper's career ends right there, it'll be 100% justified.
It wasn’t entirely the director’s fault. Mostly Universal and the producers and whoever came up with the idea to make a movie out of this in the first place.
@@SmoothCriminal12
He's a bad director.
Send him back to making TV biopics.
No one expects them to be any good.
Indeed, one of these things is not like the other (also apparently during the premiere of the movie apparently Lloyd Webber left half way through the movie looking defeated)
I don't understand why Hollywood keeps picking genres and movies to resurrect (Like Star Trek, Star Wars, and now musicals), and then picks a director who pretty much hates everything about that particular genre or universe. Like, what's the point??
Blaming the VFX artists is such a cop out. The artists only will make what the director approves of. The director looked at the designs and said “that’s what I want to show people.”
As a character designer, the reason the designs look so awful is because the bizarre designs of the characters don’t have any stylization or flare. The desire to make them realistic makes them look gross and unsettling in their anatomy. The dramatic costumes in the original musical allowed for free movement but still had the idea of hinting that they were cats. I feel so bad for the artists that were underpaid and not given the ability to give any meaningful designs due to the lack of budget and foresight.
The idea of making Cats of all plays more realistic is laughable, especially because using so much CGI and adding on every effect in post took more effort and looks more terrible than if they had just designed the costumes.
Maybe they should have made a CGI version of Felidae instead, and just called it Cats.
@@davidwuhrer6704 I don't see how that necessarily follows. It would still be unsettling in the wrong way if everyone had human faces!
@@mastermarkus5307 There are no human faces in Felidae.
"the bizarre designs of the characters don’t have any stylization or flare" - yep, they just created another uncanny valley disaster
@@davidwuhrer6704
I feel like you're missing the point f the conversation if you're just saying "make a different movie", sirrah.
“No one wants a child to become a memory” I can't believe this was an actual commercial, like WTF
HorrorGeek9 and then the song started playing!!! Legit tears of laughter.
I think that PSA was actually more horrific than Cats 2019.
I read this comment before the video's ending and didn't understand it.
Then I saw it and damn, I haven't laughted so hard in a decade, GOD DAMMIT
What can I say, we were a much more savage people prior to the new millennium.
It's why I wear my seatbelt to this day.
Because of CATS.
I remember when Jennifer Hudson was singing Memory at the end, I just wanted to grip her shoulders and say, "Jen. It's not worth it. God bless you, but this just isn't worth the effort."
She was doing what she was paid for.
“Honey you’re putting in way too much heart and soul into a production that doesn’t care at all. Gonna need you to bring it down to about a 4, maybe a 5.”
@@crimsondynamo615 "Beat it, Spider-Man!"
Fun fact: a friend of my partner actually worked on the stunts for cats, and he had to convince the production team that the actors couldn't 'land like cats' (on the palms of their hands) they would obliterate their wrists. Cats, but make it realism.
Cats are probably one of the worst animals to try to replicate realistically. Like have they ever seen how a cat acts and what they can do? How is a human supposed to replicate that without a) looking like a pervert, which is what we got here, and b) potentially harming themselves.
Just...wow. Everytime I learn something new about this production it just gets worse.
My sister always used to say you can ruin your wrists by catching yourself on them when falling.
Also, if you were to consider that cats are digigrade (pretty much, they walk and put their weight on the equivalent of our fingers/toes).........*ouch*
Coming from a background in both Musical Theater _and_ Martial Arts, I've lost track of how many times I've heard instructors say, "If you're going to the ground, don't try to catch yourself. Just do your best to protect your head and spine." I learned that lesson the hard way, twenty years ago, when I dislocated _and_ broke a finger on a relatively light take-down. Our brain, thumbs, and larynx are why our species is successful, not our ability to absorb impact.
I don't understand how a film so obsessed with visual 'realism' could completely fail at deciding how big the characters are supposed to be.
Same! There needed to be "Eat Me" "Drink Me" props for the amount of times cats were almost human sized, then back to cat proportions??
Having the cats in front of human objects just further emphasized how they do not even remotely look like cats.
I noticed that too! And it's not the VFX. They're out of scale to the *set.* The built, constructed, totally artificial set.
So between you and Sideways, I'm learning Tom Hooper is just the worst.
Sideways hates tom hooper with a passion bc of cats
@@imchilll6384 Les Mis definitely planted the pure seed of hate
I came here after watching Sideways' video to see a more positive review of Cats. That man was angry.
hearing how cats 2019 is a goddamn trainwreck from both a musical and filmmaking standpoint? a+ experience
It's a shame, because he really is a good FILMmaker. The King's Speech was a fantastic fuckin movie. But his attempts at musicals were such disasters, and he treated them like such masterpieces, that they just ruined his reputation.
I am of the opinion that the original Cats worked so well because they looked at the story asked "Why not?" while the new movie looked at the story and went "Why?"
Ooh, that's elegant, I like that.
"I wasn't sure what a cat looked like anymore." -I'm dying.
AxxL Please, shut the fuck up.
@@insertcringynamehere no
That was Folding Ideas. Definitely recommend checking out his channel if you haven't already.
Thought Ray He deleted his comment. :(
@@insertcringynamehere Oh, I'm sorry. I remove all defient annoyance.
Why did I never consider, if tom hooper really wanted it to be so realistic, why didn't all the cats have eight nipples?
#ReleaseTheNippleCut
@@myettechase Please don’t
Or maybe do like Lion King, make overrealistic cats and flop because we can't see actual face expressions
#freethecatnip
@@marinadeburgos8666 except the lion king remake didn't flop sadly :(
This demon video will not leave my recommendations. Every single thing I watch, Cat-Elba is staring at me and I know what it means to be in hell. If I leave on autoplay for too long I come back and find myself staring at writhing cat-human bodies.
"I watched it already," I say to the uncaring heavens.
"Did you like it?" say the Gods.
"I did, I did! But please, let me leave!"
There is nothing in heaven but laughter, and - from a distance, carried on the wind - 'Macavityyyyyyyy'
Criminally underrated comment: 10/10 existential rage
As I read "Macavityyyyyy" in this comment, I vividly imagined and heard the scene it described.
This comment is a literary masterpiece
Legit like every other week this video appears and I'm just like... I've watched it five times too many just... just please stop! xD
Pure Poetry
I personally REALLY wish we got Don Bluth's / Stephen Spielberg's animated version of Cats. That concept art was so cool!
it could never have happened (somewhat unfortunately) because ts eliot’s wife didn’t want the poems represented like that
@@itsplasticbabyofficialwell that’s what we’re saying. We wish she hadn’t shot it down.
don bluths style would have worked SO WELL for it too, ik they didnt want it to be like a disney movie but don bluth is pretty good at making these dark stylized animated movies about animals (like secret of nimh) he could have made such a cool animated Cats film
@@BlisaBLisa OMG! YES!!!!! I could see him actually filming live performers doing the dance numbers and using that to Rotoscope for some of the parts and Macavity would have been a proper villain like Dragon from Nimh.
I swear every time Ian McKellen meows, you can hear part of his soul leaving his body and then dying.
He’s trying to tell the audience “fly, you fools!” without actually saying so
Actually I liked his bit. Like they said on the av club, "he's doing T.S. Eliot while everyone else is doing Andrew Lloyd Webber,"
@@sudanemamimikiki1527 Check out Sideways video on Cats. Ian McKellan is speak-singing to no music. There was a piano player on set that had to follow what he was doing. So he's basically reciting a poem with no consistent rhythm and then they had to try to score the music around him.
@@sudanemamimikiki1527 The whole thing is just tragic. I can't wrap my head around why anyone would think that's a good idea.
watching Webber explain to that poor woman that “all cats are jellicle” and her completely bewildered expression had me laughing so hard I missed the next 30 seconds of the video
That was the epitome of a "the fuck is he talking about?" face. Hilarious indeed.
That dude was really into cats.. like weird creepy amount. That clip just raises hair on my arm in a mild wave. 🤣
And he’s acting like this complete nonsense is obvious and just dumb. It’s honestly incredible
One big gay question mark was floating around that room.
One of the many reasons I adore that guy.
"Don't let a child's life become just a MEMORY" is so disrespectful and the funniest thing I've heard all month.
@N K Like? :P
Genuinely, I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned them changing Macavity's colors. I wouldn't accuse it of being outright racist but its so bizarre to make the black guy's cat brown when it's not even close in color to the cat he is portraying. He's straight up described in his song as ginger.
In the musical he has a cool crazy flame-like coloration that's my favorite design by far. Just weird. It looks like he's naked!! Even more so than everyone else!
And they also describe Macavity in the song as "ginger and slim" .
Actor isn't ginger and is built, fantastic.
Tall, slim, and ginger you say?
Yeah, Idris Elba was the first actor that came to mind for me, didn't for you?
Knuckles is the closest Idris Elba will get to a theater accurate Macavity
@@randomtraveler4149 I know I'm a month late, but... Idris Elba isn't short, he's 6'2 1/2 (or 189cm) lol
@@karinmaria6455
The more you know. I've got to edit that
Still, isn't too fitting.
@@randomtraveler4149 oh yeah you're spot on about the rest haha, you just made question reality for a second by calling him short
"Macavity's a ginger cat, he's very tall and thin"
Tom Hooper: too unrealistic. Make him a swol Havana Brown.
You have no idea how irritating it is to me that every rendition I've seen don't portray him as a ginger cat.
I'm so glad someone mentioned this, it's like they swapped Macavity and Skimbleshanks' appearances and didn't bother changing the lyrics
This!
While Elba's, uh, fur colour wasn't as jarring as Lindsay seemed to think - it is somewhere between British Shorthair chocolate and a brown Burmese - it's still decidedly NOT a colour that Macavity has to be!
The fact that they somehow managed to make Idris Elba ugly and unsettling to look at is one of THE biggest crime of this movie
They literally ruined Hotness
That, and they took Macavity, who is the cat version of Prof. Moriarty, and turned him into a 70s blaxpoltation film pimp.
I didn’t think it could be done, but they somehow turned his gorgeous and charming self into a dancing, creepy turd.
Oh wow I thought the cover photo was a photoshopped troll thing but nope.... that's actually from the movie. Gosh it's like from a horror film. Also he really does look naked
The really messed up part is that's not the VFX Team's fault. The director did that.
"I want the movie to be grounded and not that fantastical"
... it's Cats. CATS. You want a movie musical about anthropomorphic cats that sing and dance to be NOT fatastical?????
I always wondered if the animated version was picked up how it would’ve turned out.
I agree, doesn´t make much sense to me either :s
Btw ur profile pic, Riku best boi
Thats literally the only way for it to work imo. I just want a director of the film adaptation to go all the way. Just lean into the weird
Rikusgirl001
This is my biggest lament as well.
What is Tom Hooper’s obsession with making everything “grounded”? He was completely the wrong choice to direct this. But of course, he won Les Mis a few Oscars so Universal thought he could just do it again with Cats.
kshamwhizzle
At least Baz Luhrman would understand the fantastical nature of a musical.
I’m not saying Moulin Rogue is a masterpiece, but it’s so stylised and so out there it doesn’t really make you question the fact that everyone is singing. This is just the way this world works.
Something like that for Cats would have been great (personally, I think an animated adaptation is the way to go) but Universal really wanted those Oscars though.
I also just learned that they did get memory totally wrong, too. Grisabella gets never touched as symbolism how she isn't a gelical cat anymore. She just wants to belong again and she's so lonely. At the end she almost gives up but then really goes off in memory and begs someone to touch her so she can belong to the gelical cats again. And then Viktoria touches her finally and noone steps in and she belongs again and it's so emotional.... but in the FILM she gets touched by viktoria and then AFTER that sings "touch me, it's so easy to leave me"...like...she already touched you so what is the point???
it's poof that they really didn't understand the source material. Or didn't care (which is worse)
And in a previous scene, she shied away from Victoria's touch too. In the musical, Grisabella is desperate to be touched, to belong, but in the movie Victoria reaches for her and she shies away. They just Didn't Get It
Ah I see you watched the Sideways video
@@ashikjaman1940 I've watched that video ten times in the past week. It's telling that Lindsay, at 47:55, says that Jennifer's part is great and even specifically calls out the "arrangement and mixing" being "so good", but after Sideways points out what's wrong in that scene I can't un-hear how it actually is messed up.
And it also just makes no sense and is very cynical to cast a young attractive woman to play her.
The movie mostly casted actors, singers, and dancers. They didn’t cast triple threats, they cast dancers who couldn’t really sing or act, actors who couldn’t really dance or sing, and singers who couldn’t really act or dance.
And then they cast Taylor Swift who cant do any of those things.
Exactly, the short answer to this whole issue is that Hollywood should have given this to the gays! You need the most extra, triple threats to make something this ridiculous work. You can't manufacture camp! I'm kidding but I really think the production was way too stiff and by-the-numbers.
Edit: words.
imcrying,t his is literall y so fucking funny
Honestly tv shows have better musical episodes then this
Ok, I'd give Derulo dancing and singing, if only because he's at least competent.
Not great, but competent.
Acting for him... ehhhhhhhhh... EHHHHHHHHHHHHH...
why is James Cordon?
I feel like that is what everyone in his life asked at some point
Solid question
I feel so cheated. In his first Doctor Who episode, he was actually quasi-endearing (and got head-butted by Matt Smith's Great Wall of Forehead... seriously, the show jokes his Doctor inspired the Easter Island Statues.)
I guess it's like a potent spice; best in small doses.
Hi dad
@@Eviltwin531 His second Who outing was beyond terrible. "I speak baby" Nothing can stop the cybermanisation process, oops I was wrong, the wuv he has for his kid can, what a load of bollocks
I do not want a Hadestown: The Movie. I DO want a released stage recording like they did with Hamilton.
Broadway is really failing itself by not adapting to the streaming world. The people they want to pay to see musicals will still do it. Just seems stupid to throw away the extra money, THEY TOTALLY DO WANT, out of the people who will never be able to see, or afford to see, them live. Even more so in the time of our lord covid, where they aren't making THE MONEY THEY WANT out of anyone.
Yes!
I want a hadestown pro-shot more than anything else in the universe
Oh goodness a movie sounds... purely awful
It is not a musical designed to work on screen (not that many are but some could work and this is notttt one of them)
But yessssssss proshot pleaseeee
they should do that with every musical tbh. and release it in theaters like a movie so everyone can see it
I still say Tom Hooper's biggest sin for Cats was erasing the aggressively gay energy from "Magical Mr. Mistoffelees"
No seriously. Ram Tag Tugger wrote that song for his husband it's cruel
straight woman detected
@@lbsc1201 you're so wrong it's scary
They are cats, not gay people. Tugger and Quaxo are just friends. Tugger clearly does it for the girls.
they're gay cats
The VFX team didn't deserve to suffer for this. The fur actually looks realistic, and it wasn't their fault the director kept changing his mind every few days. This discordant disaster was already set in stone the moment they decided to make the movie "realistic".
What a waste of effort.
Rendering realistic fur or hair is *hard*.
Maui spent most of his time with his hair tied back in Moana because they didn't have the budget to animate free-flowing hair for the full movie.
Rendering fur is computationally intensive, which is a fancy way of saying that you set everything up the way you think is right, hit "render", come back a few hours or days later, and see what you got. If the result isn't right, you start the process again.
I get anxious just thinking about trying to do that on a tight schedule.
I agree; I thought they were wearing stupid expensive suits until someone told me it was animated. It's not the VFX teams fault that the designs rolled down the uncanny valley and hit every rock on the way down.
The fur being realistic is a different movie, there was never anything wrong with the costumes in the first place for over two decades.
If you're going to change 80% of the visuals, because it's not "modern enough", you better think of something more original than incomplete mocap.
Didn't you mean: What a waste of ef-fur-t?
I'm sorry
@@igormajdandzic7587 Bravo
""I wanted to make this film grounded and realistic, so I took all of the allegorically themed sets from the stage show, and adapted them into their literal analogues." -- Tom Hooper, the man who turned Heaven into a hot-air balloon.
Some people don't have the capacity for abstract thought. Their brains just can't easily process it. Similar to how some people have aphantasia and can't think with images.
@@Uroboro_Djinn please don't compare us to this fool
Freedom for None - Uroboro Djinn true but I think Hooper has a slight lack of understanding concept musicals, which are hard to transfer to film anyway. So if you are trying to make something grounded out of something very artistic, you lose the point it’s trying to make.
Imagine taking the film Suspiria or 2001 Space Odyssey and put them Onstage with full plots so there can be two acts without understanding the visual storytelling they show without dialogue...
It seemed like he missed the most important part of the Grizabella plot, which wasn't "winning the big Heaven Prize", but being accepted and making an emotional connection after being lonely for so long. The Heaven Prize is only important to the plot because it symbolizes that the other cats have accepted her.
"I wanted to make this film grounded and realistic, so I had one my main characters shed her skin like a jacket and dance around in a circus ringmaster's suit." - Tom Hooper, the man who clearly has never known a single cat.
That Cats anti-smoking ad straight up made me disassociate
+1
This makes want to smoke more
DE HOOMINZ HED EN ACKSIDENT
I watch this so often but mostly the part where Lindsay sings "heterosexual cats" because it's such a fantastic joke
Especially with the overlays of LL Bean and the Patriots logo.
If you’re wondering who likes the stage show - dancers! I was a pretty serious ballet dancer through high school and loved the stage show because of the dancing, the physicality and atheticism of the actors is so fun to watch, especially when most broadway musicals don’t have that intricate choreography
I was a member of my high school's Thespian Club, and we made going to see CATS when it came to our city an official club event so our teacher could get score us group rate tickets. We still had to pay for our own tickets, but we gave our money to her and she bought them. We all were obsessed with CATS, and when I changed schools my senior year, I went into Competitive Speaking and interpretation of the original poems was so overdone, but we didn't care. The judges hated us all doing CATS poems though, I'm sure. Haha.
I also love love loved the stage show for the same reasons. Watched it twice. :)
Dancers, and set designers, and kids who crawl around the yard pretending to be animals all day.
@@ragabashmoon1551 this is why I endured the film. I was curious about the dancing.
I once said that Cats is the best way for dancers, makeup artists, and art designers to show off their technical skills. Also I just love Cats, it’s dumb but it’s fun (as long as we leave out Growltiger and the thing about the Pekingese in Pekes and Pollicals...)
Fans of Cats: "Why does it hurt so much?"
Tom Hooper: "Because it was REAL-istic."
Nice callback.
Well played!
Hit that nail on the head
(Also, from some reports during the premier of the “movie” apparently Andrew Lloyd Webber left the theater half way through the monstrosity(which I don’t blame him)
this is god level
@@TrueBuddhaCat
Interviewer: So how does it feel to have your most well-known musical be bastardized into a sea of uncanny valley?
ALW:.............feels great.
I cannot believe they made Macavity unscary. I was genuinely terrified of him as a kid, and now he says his own name like a Pokémon whilst vanishing using magic? Also it’s literally in the lyrics that he’s ginger what the hell
We were made to perform cats in high school PE. I was an insecure, developing teenager made to perform in a skintight leotard, in front of the whole year. The movie adaptation is worse than that memory.
I guess that even an open surgery without anestesia is better than the movie
I have several questions about your school.
@@cara_h_4 Seriously! It would make slightly more sense if it was a drama class, but PE? I'm thinking that teacher just wanted an excuse to see some developing teenagers wearing skin tight leotards.
Many props to the OP for enduring that, I probably would've ended up getting myself expelled.
Honestly would prefer that to regular pe...
Meeeeeemoryyyy
When Rebel Wilson ripped off her outer layer of skin, the full theatre I was in gasped in disgust.
@Laura Martin-Falla unzipping your skintight fur to reveal identical skintight fur is WAY creepier than revealing a fun flapper cat (dripping actual beads) concealed under a very VERY stylized accordion-esque body. Play Jennyanydots shows up onstage not looking like the other cats, and she looks like them when she reveals her nighttime persona.
Movie Jennyanydots has a ZIPPER IN HER SKIN
I actually shuddered in horror.
Laura Martin-Falla But why were her clothes red, if not to encourage a feeling of shock and disgust when Rebel Wilson Rios her “coat” off.
@Laura Martin-Falla Yeah the roach eating was the part that made me feel physically uncomfortable. Not so much that she does it. It's that she does it MULTIPLE times. One time, done quick with everything else going on, you can kinda blink and go "well I guess that happened" and not think about it. Doing it multiple times doesn't allow for that.
Jennyanydots is a Cub Scout den mother to the roaches and mice, WHY IS SHE EATING HER STUDENTS?!?!!
"Cats is almost 40 years old, much like me." But... but you're the same age as m- OH NO
OHHH NOOOOOOOOOO
greenyawgmoth tell me about it. Cue literal mid-life crisis.... Wahhhhhhh *existential screaming*
Haha this cracked me up 😂 she looks and sounds 25
Hahahaha. I turned 40 yesterday, I feel this post sooo such.
*cue Cats 2019 singing about "Memories"...*
Old twats
I love how they're like, "oh yeah we were running in to the set with the song JUST finished" like that's somehow a good story and NOT a sign of being seriously underprepared.
It's a good story, but for a high school production, not a Hollywood movie
I agree with you too an extent...you gotta understand the artistic process for songwriting in particular is not streamlined, while movoe making is down to a science at this point...trying to slow down a film to get music just right is like slowing a fraight train.
I feel like you get ONE story like that per production, max-- either they finish the song last minute, or they finish the effects last minute, but not both. And ofc it's only something you admit if the end product is good!!!
So if I'm understanding the Guy Fieri reference at the beginning correctly: Fieri was a guy that critics loved to dunk on in the past, but he's now someone people generally are cool with because he's always been himself, enjoyed it, and never intended to be the "high art" of the food world and people love that. But where Cats the stage show was largely the same, Cats the movie really wanted to be taken seriously (even though it was never designed to be) and failed miserably at it. Is that right?
It's as if instead of making his restaurant a Manhattan tourist trap Guy Fieri had marketed it as Haute cuisine with little to no changes to the menu and expected to be taken seriously. Just imagine: candle lit dining room, $200 bottles of wine, and a plate of trash can nachos.
Yeah, sounds about right.
guy fieri is cool because hes a gay ally
something the writers of the cats movie can't claim with their adaption
That's how it seems. Guy Fieri gets dunked on but he is genuine to his craft, and there are people that appreciate his craft.
Instead of adapting Cats the way it would make more sense to for a film screen, they tried to adapt it to appease the critics of Hollywood, and thought doing so could get it to an Oscar win. Except, Cats won it's awards as a stage musical in spite of the hate critics gave it, and because they tried to appease Hollywood critics from the onset, they already were doomed to disaster because they missed the point entirely.
Solanuma nigga what ??
"failures... like Balto"
DON'T YOU HURT MY BOY LIKE THAT
Balto is a masterpiece and I’ll stand by it.
Balto is a great movie, I super loved it as a kid and I still do now.
But it was unfortunately a box office failure. It does not help that it came out in the same year as Toy Story.
@@fuyutupx1437 Disney was back in full swing in the 90's. Competitors in animation at that time had no chance. That era wasn't called "The Disney Renaissance" for nothing.
Is a underrated classic.
Mate I love Balto, that movie made me undyingly loyal to dogs
“No one wants a child to become a memory”
Oh my god who had the audacity to write that commercial?!?!
57:02 for beginning of this masterpiece
Corvus you are not wrong
Still more emotionally gripping than Cats 2019
I mean, that line is fine, but that she then breaks out into song is utterly tasteless.
I'm CREASED
The comedic timing of the start of the song there is actual genius.
The best actors are the ones who aren't afraid to look ridiculous, the worst directors are the ones who don't understand how to use that skill
The moment when Rebel Wilson unzips her fur is possibly the most horrifying thing I have ever seen
You know, the first bit of the movie wasn't bad? It had me. The CGI didn't weird me out and the music was good.
Then, they started THAT song...
@DANIELLE PALAZZOLO Rebel Wilson did
Absolutely. JUST HAVE HER WEAR A COAT! Christ, it's so creepy-looking!
And they did it twice.... AND it was a part of the plot....
I animated that shot. You're welcome.
Jesus, that clip of Judi Dench cat singing to the audience is what hell feels like
It is the face of time
The face of entropy
The face of a clock
That when faces you once
Never stops
The editor should get hazard pay for this.
You can even see the actor playing Munkustrap looking at Dench keep going being like “For the love of god, are we still going on!? Tom, yell cut already!!”
I adore Dame Judi Dench, but she is NOT a singer.
Doody Stench
... never thought I’d hear Lindsay Ellis talk for a prolonged period time- or any length of time, honestly- about Guy Fieri, but here we are.
I thought there was a glitch because I clicked on video about Cats. Thanks for reaffirming my sanity lol
Every day we get closer to Homestuck's Alpha timeline.
I just absolutely love how Idris shows up and goes "mccavity!" It's...just so funny? And I feel like it wasn't entirely meant to be. But I laugh every time
It's the only fun part of the movie
I'm so glad the me that tought "weren't mistoffelees and tugger gay for each other?" wasn't just me REALLY reading into the subtext and it was actually Hooper not wanting gay cats on screen lmao
And it combined the best of two shitty worlds: by playing around with the plot they no homo'ed two romantically ambiguous(or not that ambiguous, did you see that rainbow ribbon thing, lol) cats and since Victoria is a female MC now, god forbid we would have a female protagonist without a romantic subplot. Gotta intrest the chicks, you know. And who is better to slide into the role of romantic interest, than a romantically ambiguous cat. Isn't that ingenious? Killed two birds with one shit flip of that script.
Seriously. I mean, everything in Cats can be interpreted pretty much anyway you want. But Hollywood talks a big game about Equity and Diversity etc. ,etc. but they won't ever bring "gay subtext" into the spotlight because Money. They are such hypocrites.
What’s ironic is that women will throw money at people for a (well done) gay romance. Just make it hot and steamy and you can just print money. The issue is that too many of the big het stars are (kinda justifiably) worried about being typecasted and there is a “no homo” aspect to how they feel that most directors tend not to bother with getting rid of. All the more props to Ledger and Gyllenhal for committing almost two decades ago.
I mean cat people I can buy, but GAY cat people? I can only suspend my disbelief so far, sir.
@@mitchh3092 Except that does happen in nature. Most mammals and apparently avians can be gay.
"if the VFX peasants don't want to be mocked why don't they simply work harder"
i love the little easter eggs
I'm really disappointed in James Cordon for that "joke." Those poor visual effects artists only did what they were told to do by the stubborn director. They probably worked their asses off...
Edit: holy crap, thanks for the likes guys, if you're reading this Lindsay you're awesome, a great LGBT ally and I love your stuff.
Yeah, that was such a low blow. Corden and Wilson are real assholes for doing that.
@@MintyDragonfly As an American I can tell you my country finds European accents classy and boarder line fetish fuel expecially English and French accents. You don't know how painful it is growing up with kids trying to sound English to look "cute" or "sophisticated" because of HP.
@@cecelias_ I only know that Corden is known for being an asshole. That other stuff is really depressing.
@@cecelias_ Damn, i really thought he was better than that kinda stuff, but i suppose people will always disappoint you.
It doesn't help that these are kinda bad times for VFX studios- they're in demand but they have to lowball their bids to get contracts, so they're all underpaid, the artists are pretty much all nonunion (which is also *why* movies increasingly use CG for things that could be done practically, because makeup artists and costume designers *do* have unions), and it's pretty common for them to go bankrupt just because they're not getting enough money to do the work they do. Like, the studio that worked overtime to redesign Sonic after the first trailers? They're gone now.
There's something so entertaining about how Ildris says "McCavity!!!" when he goes poof
McCavityyy!
Macaviteee
I think the "why" of "Cats" on stage is really a "for the artz" situation in a true "the medium is the message" fashion. The point of cats is its musicality, its poetics, for stage. It's not a stage version of a novel, it's a stage version of a poem. Not even a classical poem like it was adapted from, either, but the stage version of new-age poetry where the point is less what the poem is saying and more what the poem sounds and looks and feels like as an object in itself. I think it's truly a musical that doesn't work to change the medium because its medium is its whole point.
This is the only answer that has ever made sense, thank you.
As the avatar of musicals itself, my hatred is justified
Cats was the first show I ever saw. This movie hurts my heart
Nah. Cats is pretty much a softcore furry porn, it's that plain and simple. And don't get me wrong, I'm not judging, people can like and do whatever they like, I don't care. But to pretend that Cats, both the original and the new movie is some form of expression of art is just nonsense justification of some people's liking for a furry content in a sexual sense. Like I said, you like furries, that's fine.
Nico “Hal, it’s about cats.”
@@nicoinformatics this is the most r/iam14andthisisdeep take i've ever seen on one of lindsay's videos. i beseech upon you this L
The "Macavity!" scream should definitely be up there with "See how I glitter," and "I'm losing to a bird!"
"Instead of putting a cat suit on the actors, we're going to put a big, baggy, uncomfortable suit on them and have the animators animate both naked, human-shaped fur figures (on some of the cats) and human-shaped fur figures WEARING COATS (on others) after the fact." Did Tom Hooper just hate the effects team?
According to the VFX crew, yes. Apparently he treated them like garbage.
They could’ve just used fursuits
Definitely. He's a big, wealthy, oscar-winning artist and they're just a bunch of computer geeks. He already very obviously thinks he's too good for the concept of musicals; I can't imagine employees whose names no one even knows outrank his lunch.
Ironically the Les Mis cast was treated so stupidly where the actors nearly wrecked themselves with singing full blast for hours and pushing Anne Hathaway and High Jackman into really unhealthy diets for aesthetics
but thats the thing: all this bts shows the talent all in mocap so I'm confused... did they film them in mocap then tom stood behind the vfx artists while they worked and said "you better not use this time- and labor-saving tool that I'm giving you and do everything from scratch! i mean it!!" that's what everyone is making to seem like including him but i think its more likely that the people saying this just don't know what mocap is
I hate the internet for running Lindsay away from youtube, I miss her video essays like crazy. She didn't need the aggravation and we clearly didn't deserve her. Glad she's doing just fine.
I'm impressed that Cats became such a big deal in the 80s that they had the cast make advertisements against smoking and telling parents "put seatbelts on your kids so they don't die"
Yeah its surreal
Weird decade.
Did the 80s really happen or was it just a decade-long, collective fever dream?
@@ally939 when all the creatives are coked to the gills, everyone else has to go for the ride.
_What a _*_DIS-GUSTING_*_ thing to do!_
UM HELLO WHY IS REBEL WILSON TAKING HER SKIN OFF ? ??
We don't talk about that.
@@ninereeds1810 Not because we don't want to - it's just we literally can't. We don't have the words.
ReALisM?!?
itS GroUnDEd
WHY DID SHE EAT AN ANTHROPOMORPHIC ROACH
“It’s very emotional”
*cat twerks in the background*
Oh the eMoTiOn...
Also self-buttlicking.
Which scene?!?!?!?!
spooky ho
I mean, it’s not a wrong statement. That’s going to cause emotions and that mix bag of emotions is the experience.
I wish people (you know which) would stop calling any ole butt movement twerking.
I never did see Cats, but I did see Starlight Express back in the day. Cats didn’t seem so weird after seeing a bunch of roller skating anthropomorphic train cars.
James Corden being God's punishment to theatre kids is a stone cold read I wasn't prepared to take on but makes so much sense.
Ok, but have you seen him in One Man, Two Guvnors? (it's live on National Theatre's YT channel right now) He's not my *favorite* thing about the production, but it is a strong performance.
Phillip White agreed
Idris Elba got Covid-19 after this movie. I'm betting he survived it because God took pity on him for being in this movie, so he prevented him from dying just so that he could star in better films. Imagine this movie being your final big screen appearance, it would be the definition of adding insult to injury.
YIKES! Not good, so not only were the VFX team were abused but Idris Elba also got Covid-19!! That should be a sign that says “You’ll be sorry!!!”
I am scared that Cats will be sir Ian McKellens last movie, that would be a horrible fate...
@@anukoo87 As long as Bill Condon has a career, Sir Ian will have roles.
Thank God Idris was spared! Oy talk about harsh punishment for such a train wreck, but he’ll bounce back
@@LucyLioness100 Daniel Dae Kim was in that horrible Hellboy reboot and he got the virus as well (but he survived too). I wish that Hellboy 2019 got the same reputation as this film, it was just as much of an unmitigated disaster.
So, from what I am getting is:
1) Tom Hooper is a terrible musical director who thirsts for Oscars
2) Unless you have an actually good idea how to adapt a work between mediums, don't bother
3) All-Star Casts do not make a good work, as usual (especially if they have no other talent to supplement it - at this case, actual singing and dancing skills)
4) Musicals in films are better done animated form
5) Cats are not dogs
6) Macavity
Anonymous Mind #4 disagree, will shout out little shop again. (Thank you Frank Oz, Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene and Steve Martin! Forever and ever!!! What wonderful work!) edited: and the rest of the cast too, I just typed this comment in the fly. EVERYONE (the Ronettes specifically, since they sing the ENTIRE show) killed it in this movie. The production team too. Someone remake this now, please! And don’t digitalize Audrey II!
Johanna Thorn
7) Meow
8) All the hubris
9) Its about cats.
So basically, egos from top to bottom.
Literally all Hooper needed to do was have them wear costumes. ALL HE NEEDED TO DO, and it would’ve made the film better.
"Cats confirms for people who hate musicals why they hate musicals." This probably nails so well what I felt about Cats. Also, about your conclusion; I would watch a Cats film adaptation if it were just the audio from the stage show overlayed onto footage of actual cats doing cat things.
That sounds rad as hell actually.
That sounds amazing. How has no one thought of this til now?
What I don't understand is why they never stayed on tone with any decision, the biggest being no costumes:
Ok, no costumes, because you want them to be cat people instead of envisioning them as just flamboyant stylish cats like in Broadway....
But then you have them wear coats and heels on top of their CGI bodies...
Thus adding flamboyancy and style...
-_-
When they announced the film I thought that that would be what they were going to do, kind of like lion king but cats
i literally screamed "HE'S NAKED" when macavity, who had up until that point been wearing a coat, showed up without one. i went and saw it on christmas with my boyfriend (who will probably watch this video shortly as well) we're both cats fans and we were in TEARS we couldn't stop laughing or clowning about it for weeks, i genuinely LOVED it, it was SUCH an abomination against god. i gotta say jennifer hudson singing memory genuinely gave me chills and made me tear up in the theatre tho
It's like Dan Olsen in Folding Ideas noted. When you first see the naked cats it doesn't really click because like it's CGI fur, but then comes Macavity wearing his coat. Then he LOSES the coat, you think "Oh shit, he's naked", and suddenly it's like the blinders have been removed, and you realize "Oh shit, *all the cats are naked*..."
@@Kyman102 forreal lmao i started side-eyeing the sneaker cats after that
No one wanted a "The Emperor has no clothes!" Moment with CGI cats
@Kimmminem West omg wow what a novel statement, thank you SO MUCH for pointing that out, we were LOST without you.
god i forgot how long the “dench directly addresses the camera” sequence was. i cant stop laugjing
As if the glitchy CGI isn't already evident - let's bring it up to 110 percent by making it a fking close-up!!!
Basil Gabriel That poor guy to the right of her looks so uncomfortably awkward during that whole scene.
That sequence felt longer than Return of the King's six endings
I fast forward that part myself shit was so unsettling
Applause for Angelina for how she edited that scene.
Listening to this in 2021 and boy did it feel prophetic. In the category of Terrible Movie Musical Adaptation, I present to you 2021's _Dear Evan Hansen!_ It has it all:
1. A movie musical that is clearly uncomfortable with any and all musical aspects.
2. A director with Oscar ambitions taking a fairly abstract dark comedy and turning it into a gritty realistic funeral dirge so the Academy will take him seriously.
3. An original song that no one asked for that grinds the story to a halt and adds nothing to the narrative.
It's even got some of your favorite stuff from Lindsey's other videos! Such as...
- An original Broadway cast member reprising his role despite _clearly_ being too old to believably play the character now, in a show where the main character's youth is _very important to stress._ (ala RENT)
- Transparently cynical and half-hearted attempts to address criticisms of the original story that do not actually engage with those criticisms in any meaningful way, and actively detract from the story. (ala the Beauty and the Beast remake)
I feel like there should be a bingo card we fill out every time these things get released. Because, unfortunately, it looks like they're going to keep coming.
True, true. Well, at least the Matilda musical adaptation was pretty good
@@arambles1 i feel like matilda had a good starting point though, it's a children's story, and also magical enough to not expect realism but set in mostly reality so you don't get whatever the fuck cats ist
End of 2019: Cats
Beginning of 2020: Pandemic
Coincidence? Yes. But...
...thole-cut 2020.
@@rockCity777 lmaoooo
God is punishing us for our sins, apparently
End of 2019: Pathologic 2
Begin of 2020: Global Pandemic
Yay I'm thumbs up #500, making things happen on UA-cam :) also to reply to the comment: definitely suspect.
The "Why?" of the musical is simple, it evokes all of the personalities that cat-owners perceive in their felines. That's what is at the heart of the poems, and at the heart of the musical. It's also why the ridiculous costumes and the anthropomorphism work in the musical; cat-owners already perceive a "person" in their pet and the musical just registers that fact in an enhanced key that works perfectly with a heightened sense of absurdity, whimsy, etc. It's very similar to Kayfabe; cat-owners KNOW that their cats aren't people, but they play as if they are. Musical captures that right in a bottle.
The movie, on the hand, takes the Cats-Kayfabe as literal and basically presents the viewer not with human personalities dressed up as cats, but with literal cat-human hybrids. It kills everything and generates an instant "yeck" response.
Exactly! As a passionate cat owner I just see cats. I've been listening to the songs for a couple of days now and that's exactly what I love about them. It's about cats. If you ignore what's happening on stage, then it's just cats. I can recognize my own pets, I swear my brother's cat is a little Rum Tum Tugger in a sense that he wants whatever he can't get and gets stuck in furniture. I adore how Mr Mistoffelees' song is about how magic he is, but describes how it's undeniably proven just because someone heard a cat purr when he wasn't there. Or Skimbleshanks explaining how he's in charge of the entire train. That's what cats are fundamentally, they're little self-important fur balls. And the musical is just that with a little dramatical subplot to tie it together.
Actually, you're not wrong on this. Mamrie Heart said on her podcast that one of the best things to look for when traveling in a foreign country is either puppet shows, other media targeted towards children, or a stage show/musical that you are already familiar with. That way, you don't need to even know the language to follow what's happening. Something being simple doesn't automatically mean it's bad.
Exactly! I've always loved Cats! I never got why people didn't get it
this is 1000% the best explanation of CATS that I've ever read. I feel like I finally actually understand the show now.
@@wickedphant0m you can even find it in the lyrics! For example, tugger is supposed to be the kind of cat who thinks he's so amazing but in his song he fully admits that he gets stuck in drawers on the regular. Just like any spoiled beloved house cat. Or skimble who is just a cat that lives at a train station, so when the conductors are looking for him before they depart it makes him think that he *literally* is the driving force of the trains and that they physically can't leave without them. It's all goofy regular cat attitudes hidden under flair and glitter because that is exactly how they view themselves from their pov lolol
Sideways was right, once you hear that hesitation when she says "Leave me" you can't un-hear it.
What?
@@Elias6233 When Anne Hathaway is singing "I Dreamed a Dream"
@@Falicity345 No he's talking about Memory. When she sings "it's so easy to leave me", you can hear the orchestra hesitate so they can time the next chord with her singing. Sideways goes into more detail in his video which I defiantly recommend.
@@ChiChiDoesStuff Ah yes! Thank you! There are too many songs to recount for which corresponding actress. Thank you for the correction!
@@Falicity345 No worries
The uncanny Macavity Is Human Skin Colour thing could've been so easily fixed by, I don't know, maybe reading the lyrics of the song he shares the name of? That has a whole verse describing his appearance? I don't know, I'm just spitballing here.
The Show: Macavity's a ginger cat
Tom Hooper: Hmmm... What colour should we make him. Eh, let's just colour him like Idris Elba.
Maybe Taylor Swift is a colourblind cat?
That might explain it, surely.
When I watched this movie a few months ago, I had my cat sleeping in the room next to me, and when Memory started playing, she woke up, *watched the movie* (and she's never found interest in tv at all), then after the song, she went back to sleep. I think that was her equivalent of a standing ovation honestly
goddamn, jennifer hudson's talent even transcends species wow
I think you have a Jellicle cat
I’m guessing your cat was like “Wait! I hear the sweet music of my people by the voice of an angel” then once it was over your cat probably went “oh, it’s over; back to sleep then, weird abominations of nature”
(Also, kinda of a funny and embarrassing story that my mom shared with me is that when she and my dad were getting prepared to be married, one of the songs my mom wanted to used during the party after the wedding was; no joke; “Memory”; and the poor wedding planner just looked at my mom in surprise and bewilderment by telling her “But why?”, my mom explained that she loved the song and the planner agreed that the song is beautiful but then said “You do know that the cat is singing about dying, right?”; and there was this awkward pause from my mom and she was like “Oh.....I did not know that”
So yeah, my mom learned what “Memory” was really about and shared this hilarious/embarrassing story)
Oh my god, that answers the question! "Who is Cats for?!" Cats. It's...for cats.
My cat liked the song about the train cat. She watched the entire thing.
Those PSAs had me laughing out loud oh my gosh
"no one wants a child to become a memory (cue Memory)" 😂😂
That's nothing, I recently heard a Neon Genesis Evangelion PSA about AIDS
Amelia Kennington that moment physically launched me back from my computer. Amazing
A CHILD was in the car!
@@gothnerd887 i just watched that too lol!
Not at all similar to Irish road safety ads, which tend to be absolutely brutal and traumatising.
People always ask “Why is Cats?” But no one every asks “How is Cats?” 😢
🤣this should be a top comment lol
I'll do you one better: Who is Cats?
@@davincent98 i see your "who is cats" and raise you a "what the fuck was the director on"
Hey there He was on his own farts.
@@username172 I thought the video made it clear, his own ego. :p
"You don't want your child to be just a memory" WTF ???!!! That traffic safety ad is its own brand of horror