After reading the cat, I felt a lot, so I went to facebook to write a long post. Forgive me, I won't translate it into Chinese. I posted it here to provide you with some reference.
Supplement: What surprised me was Francesca's performance. I didn't know who played her before I watched it, but I found out that I liked her dance very much. Francesca can appear in front of everyone as an actor and a dancer. No matter which angle you know her from, you will be surprised to find that her other side is also good enough.
Unlike most people's opinions online, I was actually looking forward to seeing Cats, and I watched it, and I quite liked it, and it made me realise many things.
Weirdness:
The thin layer of cat fur accidentally destroyed the carefully built international moral high ground, that people claim they see everyone equally. Well here are some people who look like cats, how about this beauty? Weird? That's the underlying humanity being forced to hide for years lashing out. This made me realise those who are always on the moral high ground and say they don't judge people by their colours or appearances, are really just a well educated pretence. Cats are humans too.
Boobs:
Someone wrote a funny review about being confused by why some cats have boobs and some don't, well the fact is even female humans have boobs of different sizes, some are small enough even to be mistaken as male. Isn't the size of boobs are obviously inherited by the actors underneath the cat fur? Or are we just so used to a typical female character to have above average sized boobs in a Hollywood film that even female cats have small boobs would cause confusion?
Cats wearing fur:
Why can't they? What makes people able to wear fur from animals and not cats?
And if you think that defies the logic, because cats can't make clothes, how about singing and dancing?
This is a musical, where humans express their feelings by singing. It requires a bit of imagination normally found in west end and if you can't summon any, I suggest a small dose of psychedelic.
CG is bad:
Well I have to say the CG is actually bad, but not all of it is bad, fur-thermore what's bad isn't the design, it's all the technical things.
I know a lot of people don't like the design, but I actually enjoyed it, I even cried when I heard the final Memory song, the subtle movement of their cat ears enable the actors to channel through a bit of animal spirits.
I've never understood why people would accept some game show cosplay level looking rigid fur costume on people, with unmovable ears and tails, while totally reject much more lively and fully animatable CG counterparts that would actually enhance the performance by adding characters and subtlety.
Bad CG(technicals):
I'm sorry for people who worked under pressure and unrealistic requests with limited budget, but I have to say the technical errors I've seen in this film was an eye opener:
- Majority of the cats render are distractingly undersampled, with some extremely noisy frames that actually hurt my eyes.
- Not even one foot in this film is grounded to the floor they are standing on, not one acceptable contact shadow is seen in the film.
- Penetration everywhere, whiskers, fur, necklaces, feet with floor, feet with feet, feet with everything.
- At least 5 shots where majority of the characters are rendered in half resolution and put straight into the film, this is just disrespectful.
- Motion captured animation is so jittery that it feels like a video game from time to time.
I mean it was a car crash.
While there are some bad CG there're also some good ones, Ian Mckellen's character had in my mind the best grooming, unfortunately the render quality didn't quite match. All the close ups of their faces were done quite well.
But maybe the problems don't really matter, it still got shortlisted for best visual effects for Oscar.
The most important thing, the story and the music, I feel is quite good, while I haven't seen Cats before, I could easily understand everyone and what they want, all the lead actors have done a good job bring the roles to life and Jennifer Hudson's re-enactment of Memory broke me to tears. I think overall it's very entertaining and didn't feel long at all, to me it deserves a 3/5.
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