A Meditation on Feline Ambition
It goes a little something like this. A piece of art is created. It becomes successful. The children that loved it grow up. The art is repeated, but enough is changed that it can be sold as something new. The grown children take their children, making it successful all over again. And so it ever shall be, for we are all connected in the great Circle of Profit, er, Life.
I am, of course, talking about the new movie adaptation of the hit musical sensation Cats.
Yes, just over 24 hours ago, the internet exploded in response to the release of the Cats trailer, a trailer that featured a cavalcade inconsistently sized humanoid kitties with celebrity faces, sending us all into shock and birthing a bevy of newfound kinks all across the world. Oh, Taylor, look what you made us do. It was garish, tasteless, and (rightfully) mocked by just about everyone. The movie, by every conceivable estimation, looks terrible. And why shouldn’t it be? Cats the stage musical is — and I truly mean this — the worst piece of art ever created in any genre, period. It is insultingly bad. I loathe it.
I also cannot wait to see this movie.
Because here’s the thing — Cats the movie is going for something. It is making big, bold choices, and I doubt a single one will work. But I cannot wait to see it try. Watching something try and fail is so much more interesting than watching something technically proficient but also completely devoid of soul, of effort, of a raison d’être. Cats will be many things, but I am certain it won’t be boring.
When I wrote about the live-action Aladdin a couple of months ago, I complained that for a big fun musical, it sure didn’t seem like it wanted to be a musical (or fun). 2019’s The Lion King does not have that problem. Most of its musical numbers are intact (“Be Prepared” gets an awful downgrade, while “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” gets a nice upgrade), and yeah, it’s a musical that knows it’s a musical. However, it does have its own equally fatal problem. In the case of The Lion King, we have an animated movie that doesn’t want to be an animated movie.
You can do literally anything in animation — your only limits are the technology you’re working with and your imagination. The technology used in 2019’s The Lion King is unparalleled. The animals and the African setting look about as photo-real as anything I’ve ever seen. So the tech ain’t the problem here. It’s the imagination, or rather, the lack of it. Gone are the emotive lion faces and the huge, gravity-defying song and dance numbers. They have all been replaced by expressionless, dead-eyed lifelike replicas who sing while either walking, running, or standing in position, all among a sea of colors that range from dirt to mud. For a movie so technically impressive, it sure is ugly to look at.
Much like Weezer’s similarly Africa-set Toto cover “Africa,” The Lion King takes its source material and merely replicates it. The bulk of it is a shot-for-shot remake, with identical dialogue and scoring. It plays the world’s most expensive YouTube video — “I Recreated The Lion King Using a Bottomless Well of Money (Please Like and Subscribe).” Watching it is a purely intellectual experience. It’s impossible to become engaged with it as a story, because you’re too busy noting how shockingly identical it is to the original film.
The only time The Lion King has any life in it at all is when it puts Timon and Pumbaa front and center. Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen are a lot of fun, making the characters their own and, mercifully, giving us new (and good!) jokes (Zazu’s new line about birds tweeting in the middle of the night is, on the other hand, regrettable). If the same amount of joy and creativity were brought to the rest of the film as had been brought to those two characters, then The Lion King would have justified its own existence. Alas, such is not the case.
The Lion King will likely make a billion dollars. I doubt Cats will make a quarter of that. But I already know that while it may not have my praise, it will have my respect. I will take an ambitious fiasco over a middle-of-the-road, by-the-numbers nothing-movie every day of the week. Because that’s The Lion King’s biggest problem of all — it’s nothing. It’s a bore. It barely exists. But as long as it keeps making Disney money, the Circle of Life will continue.
