I Watch Films: Cats

Cats

T S Eliot wrote some poems about cats for his godchildren, later publishing them. Andrew Lloyd Weber set them to music and eventually put it on stage with dancers in furry leotards and ears and whiskers and it became an enormous success.

As a tiny child I saw Cats in the West End. I’ve lived with people allergic to cats for most of my life, so haven’t lived with cats, though I have been known to look after other people’s. I like a bit of musical theatre but you know, you can have too much. And as a child I was too young to be over-excited by athletic dancers in furry leotards.

Which is not to say that I wasn’t still overwhelmed by the energy and physicality of a live performance, or that I didn’t find the strange cat-like movements intriguing to the extent that I didn’t notice the plot made no sense.

Far too many years later, there’s this, a film of the musical of the book of poetry. They’ve refined and streamlined the plot (a cat is abandoned in London, meets the Jellicle Cats on the night of the Jellicle Ball, Old Deuteronomy will choose one cat to go to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn, they all sing a song to get chosen, every song is about how they do cat-things, mostly bad, Macavity the Mystery Cat kidnaps all the candidates and finally Old Deuteronomy to try and win, this is resolved by magic, then the cat chosen is the one whose song is about their feelings rather than what they do all day). I don’t think this helps or matters, because it’s about CGI enhanced cat-human hybrids singing and dancing through a scale model London.

What I want to say is that this is fun and incoherent musical with mostly one song each for a lot of characters, a few good set-pieces taking advantage of the cat-scale sets and it is weird as hell. There are cat-people being cat-people in it, and because it's expressed in song and dance, the stylised presentation makes it stranger and more alien than I expected.

Watch This: For a truly unique musical
Don’t Watch This: If a furry song and dance routine is too much for you
For My Sins: This is the last film I watched in 2020