There’s been no shortage of news lately but conversation towards the end of last week was dominated by one thing… the Cats trailer.
A two-and-a-half-minute teaser for the upcoming movie debuted late on Thursday night and thanks to the bizarre CGI fur, an A-list cast and a series of not-quite-to-scale sets, it left us with a lot of questions – one of which, it seems, has now been answered.
The trailer closes with a nod to the musical’s creator, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and also credits T.S. Eliot, the late poet who penned the collection the show his based on.
Seeing Eliot’s name left many fans asking the same thing – what would he have made of the trailer?
Well, Eliot’s estate has provided a pretty good suggestion.
In a statement issued to the Guardian, administrator Clare Reihill suggests the poet would probably have liked what director Tom Hooper has done.
Referring to the Eliot collection which inspired the Broadway show, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, she said: “The cats in the poems inhabit a world that is slightly unfixed: sometimes the cats seem to exist in a normal human world, sometimes they seem to inhabit an all-feline one – it’s never quite clarified.
“I think Eliot might have enjoyed the rich strangeness of the blurring of the boundary between human and cat in the trailer, which is in keeping with the elusiveness of the world of the poems.”
“He was also a great fan of Jacques Tati’s movies, with their surreal urban ballets,” she concluded.
Hopefully the film will answer some of the other pressing questions we have, including why some of the cats are just covered in the weird CGI fur, while others appear to be wearing coats, and in Idris Elba’s case, a hat.
Cats will be released in December 2019.