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I have been thinking a lot aboutCatsthis month.
(If youre still with us after25 days of nonstop coverage, thank you.
I saw the movie twice last week, and since then I have not known peace.
Its not theCGI fur.
Its not the fact that Idris Elba is the only cat with abs.
Its not that Judi Dench described her gender-bent Deuteronomy astrans.
No, I am being haunted by a bowl of peas.
The cats are bopping around the place, eating the familys roast and breaking the dishes.
(As an aside: What time is it?
Except the bedroom the cats also trash is likewise unoccupied, indicating the houses residents might not be home.
What say you?)
And then you see it.
The bowl of peas.
The peas are large enough for a cat to hide behind, dwarfed by the porcelain.
It was like a Guess how many gumballs are in the jar?
contest at a county fair, except the prize here for a correct guess is just existential despair.
The effect makes the actors look smaller, more like cats than people.
But onscreen, this tactic is applied willy-nilly.
Inside the pillowcase, Victoria looks tiny, occupying only a small fraction of the bottom.
When she emerges, she appears significantly larger and proportional to the other cats.
(Mostly because they are all humans.)
During that same scene with Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, the trio steals some jewelry.
A human necklace wrapped thrice around Victorias neck becomes cat sized.
The pearls are practically as big as her whole face.
A diamond-studded watch fits perfectly around her tiny neck as a collar.
And, most baffling, human-sized rings slip over her wrist like loose bangles.
The cats pull a pair of panties and a bra out of a dresser.
The underpants are comically large, and the bra cups could easily fit several cats inside each one.
At one point, Victoria seats herself at the dinner table holding a knife and fork.
The cutlery is taller than she is.
In a different scene, Bustopher Jones (James Corden) sings about being fat.
Thats essentially his whole shtick.
Hes a fat cat, much wider than the rest of the cats.
Theyre the fat cats!
Look how much fatter they are than the other cats!
And yet, its unclear exactly how big Bustopher is because everything else around him is so inconsistently sized.
A Champagne bottle poured into his open mouth is bigger than his body.
When he pulls whole shrimp from the trash and eats it, the crustacean is bigger than his head.
Later, he crawls into a metal trash can, and his body fills up the entire width.
A humans bowler hat is large enough for one cat to comfortably fit inside, maybe two.
Well, I have seenCats.
I have seen it twice.
And I can tell you a cat is smaller than a fork and a knife.
(The mice are CGIed children who stand on two legs and have functional human hands.)
I can also tell you nobody involved in the making ofCatshas ever seen a cat before.
