Look Upon the Cats Trailer and Despair, for God Is Dead and Digital Fur Technology Reigns Supreme

Internet users braced themselves on Wednesday when an eye-popping teaser-trailer for the upcoming cinematic adaptation of Cats featured a line about the film's use of Digital Fur Technology, a state-of-the-art CGI technique which would give the actors the hairy look necessary for a production of Cats. The teaser offered no glimpses into what that might look like, but it did give us this brilliant insight from James Corden:

Yesterday, we got a look at the big DFT in action when the first official trailer for Cats dropped. Before we dive into the Twitterpocalypse it hath wrought, let's take a look at it, shall we?

So. This is certainly something.

On the whole, Twitter users were quite disturbed by the Cats trailer. To many, there was something uncanny about seeing the faces of famous actors and actresses superimposed onto human-cat hybrid creatures (can't imagine why). This resulted in a meme deluge comparable to that which followed the Sonic.

While many had fun dunking on the bizarre trailer, others pointed out that it is very much into the spirit of the Cats stage production. For those unfamiliar, Cats is an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical that had one of the most successful runs in theater history towards the end of the 20th century. It ran for 21 years in London's West End and for 18 years consecutive years on Broadway, becoming the longest-running show of all time before it was passed by The Phantom of the Opera. It looked like this:

The human-cat hybrids concocted by the film's "Digital Fur Technology" may be goofy-looking to modern viewers, but they are definitely attempting to evoke the stage production. More musical-theater inclined Twitter users stepped in to defend the trailer against critics by pointing this out.

It's always fun when Twitter loses its collective mind over something, and it's particularly amusing that this week's "something" is a musical adaptation. It appears as though Cats has the potential to be either a train wreck or a campy technical marvel. Whichever way it turns out to be, it will almost certainly be entertaining.