There's a lot of conversation all over social media about the trailer, but I just want to get my thoughts down in one place. I'm very much 50/50 love/hate about this film - all along, every announcement had me going "yay!" "Oh no" in exact equal quantities.
It's worth bearing in mind that it's only the music and the poems that match the show we love - everything else, every character not described in the poems, every plot element, character appearance, all the choreography - that's all the work of Gillian Lynne, Trevor Nunn and John Napier, all that is up for change in the movie.
So....
- Love the set design! Stunning locations.
- Casting sounds perfect (Ray Winstone as Growltiger!)
- The music we've heard so far sounds great
- I really like that it is SO far from the stage show. I want this to stand on its own, as unlike the stage show as possible, its own concept. So I'm all for the spoken script and story changes.
But -
- Character designs are uncanny valley and creepy and they DON'T LOOK LIKE CATS. I don't mean, "Bombalurina's meant to be red and black" - that's John Napier's interpretation and out the window here. But the head shapes are all wrong... cats heads are wider than they are tall, humans are the opposite. The stage costumes, the wigs counteract this with the sideburns making the human head much wider.
- The ears are too small - again, proportions.
- The female cats have a lot of bust. It's creepy. This is also the problem with proportion - the stage costumes have fluffies on the shoulders, this softens the head/neck/shoulder human shape.
- Their heads look way too small - so the bodies seem too big, and too human.
- This much-hyped "amazing never before seen CGI" looks a lot like a video chat filter - quick, cheap, common.
- The CGI fur really doesn't work, it has no weight or body. We've seen much better fur CGI characters in the past 20 years.
Also -
- I'm so torn on what seems to be the "Ascent to the Heaviside Layer" in Trafalgar Square. It's a stunning visual, but, "Up, up, up, past the Russell Hotel..." - the Russell Hotel is in Russell Square. Not Trafalgar Square. It's lazy film-making going "eh, one London landmark is as good as another right..."
- Similarly, why does Misto appear to be a Pearly? The Pearly Kings and Queens are a very specific London tradition of charity fund-raising. It's cultural appropriation to just pick and choose elements of a culture, regardless of their original meaning, to use as costume. But most people don't seem to recognise Cockney as a valid culture, trust me, it is!
- 90% of ginger cats are male. It appears both Jenny and Bomba are ginger - statistically unlikely. Plus, Jennyanydots is described in the book - "Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots".
But - many people with CGI industry knowledge are saying that the graphics in the trailer will be very much unfinished. Most of my problems are with the CGI, so it's entirely possible that given the massively negative reaction, they'll go back and fix the most glaring problems of proportion. Time will tell!
ETA - also, "You Will Believe"? Are we actually going to see Grizabella beamed up into a flying saucer at the end? Is that why they kinda look like aliens?