Let's look at how well "digital fur technology" is doing to sell people on those Cats cats

By Reid McCarter  |  July 19, 2019 | 7:18pm
Aux Features Film
Let's look at how well "digital fur technology" is doing to sell people on those Cats cats
Screenshot: Universal Pictures

The upcoming, Tom Hooper-directed version of Cats is an expensive, carefully-managed production put together by committed and talented artists. You can tell this because, in a behind-the-scenes look at how the movie was made, we have a very serious-sounding designer telling the viewer that “we’ve used digital fur technology to create the most perfect covering of fur.”

This digital fur technology sounds like it must have been part of an intensive, sophisticated process that’s doubtlessly required hours of painstaking work. With that in mind, and now that everyone’s had a chance to check out the movie’s first trailer, let’s see what they think of the results.

There are more where that came from because the internet, in one of the few moments when its users truly stand united, is collectively trying to grapple with the movie’s uncomfortable psychological effects together. Regardless of the digital fur technology’s effects, everyone seems to be concentrating mostly on the upsettingly human-like qualities of these freakish hybrids.

Others have found themselves dogged (or catted) by images of specific cast members, their familiar visages apparently deepfaked onto humanimal-looking feline bodies.

With so much discussion, nobody seems to be very interested in how lifelike the fur covering Cats’ line-up of genetic accidents has turned out. Instead, the past day has been spent simply trying to reckon with what Hollywood, in its infinite hubris, has wrought upon an unsuspecting public. They had the technology and they used it, not allowing themselves to think of what they were forever entering onto the cultural record in the process. As James Corden says of the film’s aesthetic toward the end of the making of clip, “there is nothing else like it.”

He sure got that part right.

Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]

 
Join the discussion...