Watch: Broadway Musical ‘Cats’ Comes to Life in Bizarre Trailer

The first trailer for the film adaptation has Twitter guffawing.

Taylor Swift in a still from Cats.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Universal Pictures released the first trailer for its upcoming film adaptation of the Tony-award winning Broadway musical Cats, and the reaction to the footage has been interesting to say the least.

The film features an all-star cast consisting of Taylor Swift, Jason DeRulo, Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and newcomer Francesca Hayward.

Watch the trailer below.

The film is highly anticipated for a variety of reasons. Academy Award-winning director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, The Danish Girl) returns to the musical, a genre he had great success with in the 2012 hit Les Miserables. The original play, composed by theatre legend Andrew Lloyd Webber and loosely based on a book by TS Eliot, has been highly acclaimed and hugely succesfful since its 1981 debut.

However, what most were looking forward to was how Hooper would translate the play’s unique visuals to film. Cats comprises an entirely feline cast of characters, with the actors using make-up and costumes to achieve their look. The actors in the film have stated that they have gone for a more literal approach, performing on all fours and using “digital fur technology” to appear as the titular cats.

Well, we now know what that looks like. The Cats trailer is hugely disorienting, if not utterly baffling. The visual effect of CGI cats with the actors’ faces clumsily slapped on is being described as alternately horrifying and strangely sexual. Twitter is having a field day with the trailer, with many questioning if the film ends up as a gateway drug to furries. Some even compared it to the Sonic The Hedgehog trailer whose uncanny CGI receives such a harsh reaction that the filmmakers promised to redesign the lead character.

Here are some of the funniest reactions to the Cats trailer.

Here’s the official synopsis:

Over a single night, a tribe of cats called the Jellicles make what is known as “the Jellicle choice” and decide which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life.

Cats releases in US theatres on 20 December.