Cats (2019) on Netflix
Abandoned in London, a young white cat named Victoria is taken in by the Jellicles. Their leader, Old Deuteronomy, chooses one cat a year to ascend to the Heaviside Layer.
- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb2.8/1059,645 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes19%
Trailer
Plot summary
In a London street, a car pauses by a building and leaves a bag in the garbage. Cats gather to look at it, and inside is a white cat named Victoria, who has been abandoned. The cats introduce themselves as the Jellicles, and Mr. Mistoffelees befriends her. Munkustrap explains why the names of Jellicle cats matter, and the others ask Victoria for her own. She receives an invitation to the Jellicle Ball, held once a year, where the tribe's leader, Old Deuteronomy, picks the cat who will travel to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn. Victoria is shown candidates including Jennyanydots, a domestic tabby who dozes through the day and reforms mice and roaches at night, and the Rum Tum Tugger. Grizabella, a shabby cat, appears and is turned away; she once left the tribe with Macavity.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cats (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- After bad reviews, Universal told cinemas on opening day that a new version with better visual effects would be ready to download on 22 December, and asked them to swap out the current print. Executives and cinema owners called releasing a changed version of a film already in wide release "unheard of".
- The first release of Cats had many CGI mistakes. In one scene, Judi Dench's human hand with her wedding ring shows up in place of Old Deuteronomy's cat paw.
- A visual effects editor said an early, unfinished version of Cats showed visible anuses. A crew member said this was not intentional but came from the film's "unique visual effects", and one crew member was told to edit out anything that looked like an anus.
- The Daily Beast reported that sources at one VFX studio said staff worked 80 to 90 hour weeks to finish the effects by the release date, and Tom Hooper sent belittling emails to individual VFX artists and insulted them during conferences.
- For Cats, Tom Hooper skipped the usual CGI step of checking partly rendered scenes, wanting full renders before he looked at them. He also told crews to base every movement on real cats, and someone had to note that cats do not dance.
- The team spent six months making the film's two-minute trailer, which left only four months to finish the whole 110-minute film. Its visuals were finished just hours before the premiere.
- At the 92nd Academy Awards, James Corden and Rebel Wilson appeared as Bustopher Jones and Jennyanydots and mocked the film's CGI while presenting Best Visual Effects. This drew criticism from the production's VFX animators, many laid off when Mill Film Montreal and MPC Vancouver closed, and condemnation from the Visual Effects Society.
- Judi Dench had been cast in the original stage musical but had to pull out because of a torn Achilles tendon. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tom Hooper then made Old Deuteronomy a female cat and offered her the role.
