Post by hydraspectre1138 on Jun 25, 2021 2:18:52 GMT -5
Yes, Cats is an animated film.
It is motion capture similar to Mars Needs Moms and The Polar Express.
Anyways:
Title: Cats
Writers: Lee Hall & Tom Hooper
Director: Tom Hooper
Score: 18/100
Cringe-Inducing Audio: 1/10
Cringe-Inducing Visuals: 5/10
Lacklustre Writing: 6/10
Annoyance: 3/10
Disturbing Content (Out Of Place): 2/10
Unnecessary Cruelty: 0/10
Rancid Morality: 0/10
Low Production Values: 1/10
Unfortunate Implications: 0/10
Character Derailment: 0/10
Other Notes:
I can get past the disturbingly hyper-realistic alien tone and visuals of the film but some of the CGI is flat-out unfinished, it is like they were rushing it out for Christmas and released an unfinished product (insert Bethesda, Cyberpunk 2077, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 jokes here) with glitchy visuals.
Tom Hooper is the wrong director for a musical with as little of a plot and as surreal as Cats, he was going for a more realistic tone like his adaptation of Les Misérables but while they are from the same playwright, they have completely different tones and Tom Hooper is just the wrong director for the film and his vision for a Cats musical film just does not work for what the musical was. His changes to the adaptation are also very confusing and pointless. He was desperate for it to become Oscar bait but Cats does not lend itself to an Oscar bait film, and forcefully adding a central narrative to a musical that previously only had very loosely connected musical numbers and a thin plot that was merely an excuse for spectacular musical numbers with people in costumes.
Cats is a simple musical and Tom Hooper is forcefully injecting depth into it when injecting the depth would make the musical worse.
The two scrappies of the film are Rebel Wilson as Jennyannydots and James Corden as Bustopher Jones, but while I can tolerate Rebel Wilson, I hate James Corden and I think he is one of the most arrogant and annoying celebrities of all time, and just having him in a film can degrade the quality drastically, even when I can tolerate him in Trolls. That said, even Rebel Wilson has her annoying parts because these two characters are played more as fat comic relief characters which is just tiring at this point. Just replacing James Corden with someone else and downplaying their comic relief aspects like in the stage musical would heavily improve the film.
I do have to say most of the musical numbers are great and it is great to watch this film as a series of loosely-connected musical numbers with surreal visuals. And listening to the soundtrack on its own is great, some may even say to skip watching the film entirely and just listen to the soundtrack. The new original song from Taylor Swift here, "Beautiful Ghosts" is also really great and deserved the Oscar for Best Original Song.
The most tragic part about the film is that it could have been something really great. It was a US/UK/China/Japan co-production between Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment in the US, Working Title in the UK, Perfect World Pictures in China, and Toho in Japan. Yes, this had help from the same studio that made the Godzilla films, Your Name., My Hero Academia, and many of Akira Kurosawa's masterpieces. Apparently, Toho's involvement was very little but they could have made something really special with this film if they had more involvement and Tom Hooper was not as involved with the direction.
Toho is really great with tokusatsu, pioneering the art form with 1954's Godzilla and further refining the art form with every new tokusatsu film, with their latest one being 2016's Shin Godzilla and the upcoming Shin Ultraman.
Toho is also great at making visually stunning anime like Your Name., Weathering With You, The Garden of Words, and Promare, while helping with other anime films like Mary and the Witch's Flower, Studio Ghibli's films, and Mamoru Hosoda's films.
If Toho made it a practical effects tokusatsu with actors in high quality fursuits just like the stage musical but with a much higher budget and quality, with the same production team behind Shin Godzilla, or made it a 2D anime film with the creators of Your Name., Studio Chizu, Studio Trigger, Studio Khara, Studio Ponoc, or Studio Ghibli, while discarding the toned down realistic tone from Tom Hooper and embracing the more bonkers side of the musical, it would have been received much better than the film we actually have now.
And even with this Japanese production in mind, they should still have English-speaking actors to stay authentic.
Instead of Taylor Swift as a CGI cat mutant, she would look really great as an anime catgirl and she would easily be everyone's top anime waifu.
Whenever I see Cats (2019), I see missed potential. It could have been one of the biggest anime films of all time or one of the biggest tokusatsu films of all time if Toho had more involvement and made it a spectacular musical anime instead of Tom Hooper turning it into a motion capture abomination Oscar bait.
I cannot bring myself to completely hate the film like most people but it is the pinnacle of missed potential.
It is motion capture similar to Mars Needs Moms and The Polar Express.
Anyways:
Title: Cats
Writers: Lee Hall & Tom Hooper
Director: Tom Hooper
Score: 18/100
Cringe-Inducing Audio: 1/10
Cringe-Inducing Visuals: 5/10
Lacklustre Writing: 6/10
Annoyance: 3/10
Disturbing Content (Out Of Place): 2/10
Unnecessary Cruelty: 0/10
Rancid Morality: 0/10
Low Production Values: 1/10
Unfortunate Implications: 0/10
Character Derailment: 0/10
Other Notes:
I can get past the disturbingly hyper-realistic alien tone and visuals of the film but some of the CGI is flat-out unfinished, it is like they were rushing it out for Christmas and released an unfinished product (insert Bethesda, Cyberpunk 2077, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 jokes here) with glitchy visuals.
Tom Hooper is the wrong director for a musical with as little of a plot and as surreal as Cats, he was going for a more realistic tone like his adaptation of Les Misérables but while they are from the same playwright, they have completely different tones and Tom Hooper is just the wrong director for the film and his vision for a Cats musical film just does not work for what the musical was. His changes to the adaptation are also very confusing and pointless. He was desperate for it to become Oscar bait but Cats does not lend itself to an Oscar bait film, and forcefully adding a central narrative to a musical that previously only had very loosely connected musical numbers and a thin plot that was merely an excuse for spectacular musical numbers with people in costumes.
Cats is a simple musical and Tom Hooper is forcefully injecting depth into it when injecting the depth would make the musical worse.
The two scrappies of the film are Rebel Wilson as Jennyannydots and James Corden as Bustopher Jones, but while I can tolerate Rebel Wilson, I hate James Corden and I think he is one of the most arrogant and annoying celebrities of all time, and just having him in a film can degrade the quality drastically, even when I can tolerate him in Trolls. That said, even Rebel Wilson has her annoying parts because these two characters are played more as fat comic relief characters which is just tiring at this point. Just replacing James Corden with someone else and downplaying their comic relief aspects like in the stage musical would heavily improve the film.
I do have to say most of the musical numbers are great and it is great to watch this film as a series of loosely-connected musical numbers with surreal visuals. And listening to the soundtrack on its own is great, some may even say to skip watching the film entirely and just listen to the soundtrack. The new original song from Taylor Swift here, "Beautiful Ghosts" is also really great and deserved the Oscar for Best Original Song.
The most tragic part about the film is that it could have been something really great. It was a US/UK/China/Japan co-production between Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment in the US, Working Title in the UK, Perfect World Pictures in China, and Toho in Japan. Yes, this had help from the same studio that made the Godzilla films, Your Name., My Hero Academia, and many of Akira Kurosawa's masterpieces. Apparently, Toho's involvement was very little but they could have made something really special with this film if they had more involvement and Tom Hooper was not as involved with the direction.
Toho is really great with tokusatsu, pioneering the art form with 1954's Godzilla and further refining the art form with every new tokusatsu film, with their latest one being 2016's Shin Godzilla and the upcoming Shin Ultraman.
Toho is also great at making visually stunning anime like Your Name., Weathering With You, The Garden of Words, and Promare, while helping with other anime films like Mary and the Witch's Flower, Studio Ghibli's films, and Mamoru Hosoda's films.
If Toho made it a practical effects tokusatsu with actors in high quality fursuits just like the stage musical but with a much higher budget and quality, with the same production team behind Shin Godzilla, or made it a 2D anime film with the creators of Your Name., Studio Chizu, Studio Trigger, Studio Khara, Studio Ponoc, or Studio Ghibli, while discarding the toned down realistic tone from Tom Hooper and embracing the more bonkers side of the musical, it would have been received much better than the film we actually have now.
And even with this Japanese production in mind, they should still have English-speaking actors to stay authentic.
Instead of Taylor Swift as a CGI cat mutant, she would look really great as an anime catgirl and she would easily be everyone's top anime waifu.
Whenever I see Cats (2019), I see missed potential. It could have been one of the biggest anime films of all time or one of the biggest tokusatsu films of all time if Toho had more involvement and made it a spectacular musical anime instead of Tom Hooper turning it into a motion capture abomination Oscar bait.
I cannot bring myself to completely hate the film like most people but it is the pinnacle of missed potential.