The trailer for Tom Hooper's cinematic adaptation of "Cats" has provoked strong reactions online.
ADVERTISEMENTThe trailer for Tom Hooper's cinematic adaptation of "Cats" has provoked strong reactions online.
Many Twitter users were baffled by the trailer, in which well-known stars like Taylor Swift and Jason Derulo played glamorous yet pseudo-sinister cats, clothed in CGI fur.
The quality of the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) was another point of online contention, leaving several social media users unimpressed.
A recurring theme in online reactions was the exaggerated feminisation of female cats, who are given curvy, womanly figures and even makeup.
Comparisons were made to previous poorly received feline films.
The trailer has certainly got people talking. Within an hour of its release, the teaser racked up more than 100,000 views and #Cats rapidly became Twitter's top-trending hashtag.
'Cats' is a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running stage musical which premiered on the West End in 1981. Webber's musical is also an adaptation, of T.S. Eliot's 1939 book of poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
The collection is a bit of a poetic oddity for Eliot, who is known for his weighty high-literature like The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland along with extensive collections of literary criticism.
In contrast, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is a poetry collection written for children and uses simpler techniques like sing-song verse and nonsense rhyme.
Director Tom Hooper is also known for his more serious works. His past achievements include the direction of The King's Speech in 2010 and Les Misérables in 2012.
"Ineffable effable/Effanineffable," the closing line of The Naming of the Cats, may perfectly sum up people's startled, vocal reactions to the trailer.