Meow! For months we’ve wanted to know what Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, James Corden and more would actually look like covered in CGI fur, and in Thursday’s first trailer for “Cats,” “a new day has begun,” as Jennifer Hudson sings.
Director Tom Hooper has given his cast a healthy coat of digitally-generated fur and whiskers, making the human actors and dancers in the film resemble cats without losing their human attributes. They look like the actors we recognize, except they have fur and they’re cats.
“Come, we’re about to begin,” a cat that looks an awful lot like Judi Dench says in the trailer to newcomer Francesca Heyward.
Hooper has constructed sets that provide the illusion that everything is from the perspective of a cat and made to look four times as large.
The story involves a tribe of cats called the Jellicles, who unite every year and decide which cat should be elevated to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. Webber based the musical on a story by T.S. Eliot in his book “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” and the play first premiered in 1981 at the New London Theatre in the UK.
“Les Miserables” director Hooper, who also wrote the screenplay with Lee Hall, directs a cast that stars Idris Elba, Rebel Wilson, Dench, Ian McKellen, Corden, Swift, Ray Winstone, Hudson and Jason Derulo.
Universal is releasing “Cats” on Dec. 20, 2019.
Watch the first trailer above.