Movies like The Lion King and Cats are mere pretext for the larger narrative of technological progress.
If historians of the future try to pinpoint the exact moment when the term "digital fur" became ubiquitous in our culture, they might identify the evening of July 18, when the Cats trailer premiered online just as the first public screenings of Disney's The Lion King remake were unspooling across the country.
Here were two state-of-the-art endeavours, using computer-generated fur — by all accounts an enormously difficult and time-consuming special-effects undertaking — toward extremely different ends. On one side was a new version of a 1994 animated family classic that had been digitally engineered to look like a real adventure set among real lions in a real, albeit unidentified, stretch of Africa. On the other, a bizarre trailer for a surreal musical, set at night in an imaginary city, featuring real actors and singers and dancers (Taylor Swift! James Corden! Judi Dench!) as cat people traipsing around in human-ish bodies covered in seemingly real fur.
And while The Lion King has become a gargantuan hit, many critics find themselves wondering what's ultimately so special about a movie that tries to weld the original's Hamlet-by-way-of-Bambi melodrama onto something that, after all those effects, looks as if it could just be another wildlife special (although one with a higher budget than the company's Disneynature documentary series). The Lion King seems diminished when it enters the real world — even if that world isn't technically real at all — perhaps because it's not actually meant to be a story about lions but an allegory about people.
And — brace yourselves — Cats isn't actually about cats either. The jury is out on how Tom Hooper's completed movie will fare when it opens in December and how faithful it will be to Andrew Lloyd Webber's lavish, nutty theatrical extravaganza of the 1980s. To its credit, unlike The Lion King, Cats has not tried to make its feline characters in any way realistic. Still, one does wonder what, exactly, they were going for. Watching the clips of these actors covered in photorealistic fur, I can't help thinking that all that effects work has resulted in something not too different from the goofy feline costumes worn by the performers in the recorded version of the stage show broadcast (and later released on home video) in 1998.