The first Cats trail­er is here, all alone in the moonlight

That dull, far­away tan­gle of screams you may cur­rent­ly be hear­ing is just the pub­lic col­lec­tive­ly pro­cess­ing the new­ly arrived trail­er for Cats, Tom Hoop­er​’s adap­ta­tion of the long-run­ning Broad­way musi­cal. Nobody was pre­pared, not one of us, for the Christ­mas tentpole’s hideous­ly unnat­ur­al fusion of dig­i­tal imagery and organ­ic flesh. (In lieu of a new fea­ture from David Cro­nen­berg, this will most cer­tain­ly do.)

Ear­li­er this week, it came out that the pro­duc­tion had employed pur­port­ed­ly cut­ting-edge ​“dig­i­tal fur tech­nol­o­gy” to ren­der its star-stud­ded cast as feline crit­ters, but the results teased in the clip below exceed even the wildest expec­ta­tions. Giv­en, that is, that the expec­ta­tion was for hor­ri­fy­ing mutants bear­ing the faces and vague bod­i­ly out­lines of our culture’s most-mar­ketable celebrities.

The anthro­po­mor­phized drama­tis per­son­ae sing and dance their way around a too-big world, as Hoop­er employs forced per­spec­tive and over­sized scenery to make his actors look like they’re a foot tall. The likes of James Cor­den, Tay­lor Swift, Jen­nifer Hud­son, Judi Dench, Rebel Wil­son, Idris Elba, Ian McK­ellen, Ray Win­stone, and Jason DeRu­lo offer tales of woe, love, and hope in song. As for the actu­al plot of Cats, feel free to peruse the Wikipedia syn­op­sis, a tru­ly wild ride.

The trail­er con­tains a great many con­found­ing ele­ments, and that’s in addi­tion to the Dr. More­au test sub­jects pranc­ing around the sets. Why does Tay­lor Swift have a bejew­eled pimp cup labeled ​“CAT­NIP”? What were the con­ver­sa­tions with the uncom­fort­able tech assis­tants dur­ing Judi Dench’s motion-cap­ture process like? Is the dis­tinct­ly sex­u­al vibe inten­tion­al or just unavoid­able giv­en the material?

But that’s Cats, a film swollen with secrets and steeped in the unknown. It plumbs the uncan­ny val­ley to Mar­i­ana Trench depths, where no light can reach and strange, fright­en­ing new species can flourish.

Cats comes to the­aters in the UK and US on 20 December.