Speaking to The Guardian, Clare Reihill, who administers the Elliot estate, said that the late author would have been pleased with how disturbing the characters look within the film.
“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 – or indeed the nocturnal surrealism of something like Rhapsody on Windy Night [the basis of the song Memory]. He was also a great fan of Jacques Tati’s movies, with their surreal urban ballets.”
The musical is based on a series of poems compiled into a book titled Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Reihill commented that the world in the poems is as strange as the one in the trailer:
“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.”
Cats will hit theaters this Christmas.
Featured Image Via IndieWire