$100M OF PURRFECTION... CATASTROPHE?

It’s the spectacular movie version of the Lloyd Webber classic with a stellar cast. So why are critics’ claws out?

TIMe spent with cats is never wasted, said the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The world is about to see the truth — or otherwise — of that statement. Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber megamusical phenomenon, has been turned into a big-budget Hollywood film that swaps Spandex bodysuits and facepaint for computer-generated cat people swathed in ‘digital fur’.

Furry people may sound just a little alarming but Cats has always been an outlandish affair.

Lloyd Webber had to take out a second mortgage on his home to raise the money for the original stage version after financial backers flinched at his offbeat idea for an all-singing, all-dancing show based on T. S. eliot’s whimsical poetry collection, Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats.

But that was 1981. Universal Studios has now lavished about $100 million on its new outing for Macavity the Mystery Cat, Grizabella the Glamour Cat and all the other ‘Jellicles’, a tribe of moggies who live in a junk yard and must compete over one night for the chance to win another life.

Combining the songs of the world’s most successful musical composer, the Oscarwinning director Tom Hooper, and an all-star cast that includes Taylor Swift, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Idris elba, James Corden and Rebel Wilson, the movie Cats should be a Christmas must-see.

However, as with the original stage version, the journey has not been smooth.

ATRAILeR for the film, which opens in cinemas on December 20, was greeted with snorting derision on social media, with some even claiming the characters looked so disturbing they’d caused nightmares.

It prompted some swift tinkering with the computer-generated images. Hooper has admitted the strong reaction was not something he’d been prepared for.

And then we learnt that Universal had cancelled a gala London screening this week — making do only with an international premiere in New York. Since the story is set in London, this is a significant omission.

Universal insiders say the CGI (computergenerated imagery) took longer than anticipated — but it had to be perfect.

Many fine reputations are, after all, at stake.

Lloyd Webber doesn’t own the rights any longer but is a producer on the film. Cats has always been his kitten, a hugely lucrative one that has grossed nearly $3 billion around the world.

The 71-year-old virtuoso has said he ‘ thought it best’ for others to think through the score as tastes have changed in the decades since he wrote the original.

He told the Mail’s Baz Bamigboye: ‘To pretend I was 30 again was silly.’ Lloyd Webber’s spokesman was keen to stress he had nothing to do with the scrapping of the London gala and that his involvement ‘is limited to the music’. It is already earning plaudits. This week, Lloyd Webber and pop star Taylor Swift were nominated for a Golden Globe for Beautiful Ghosts, a song from the film.

It is the visuals that have been the biggest challenge.

Tom Hooper — who directed The King’s Speech and a screen version of Les Miserables which won three Oscars — spent more than a year working out how to make the actors as feline as possible, employing 4,000 special- effects computer technicians on four continents to apply ‘digital fur’ to their faces and bodies.

each cat’s pelt had to be painstakingly added frame by frame.

Trailers have shown the ‘ cat people’ with fuzz all over their human faces and suggestively swishy tails protruding from their derrieres.

Some cats wear clothes while others don’t, prompting critics to wonder whether the latter characters are supposed, in fact, to be naked.

Several female characters even have rather distracting furry breasts.

For her part, Taylor Swift, one of the ‘naked’ cats, has praised the ‘weirdness’ of making the movie.

Film insiders insist that many of the critics simply don’t understand the camp spirit of the musical. The truth is that Cats has always polarised opinion. Lloyd Webber is a cat-lover who, as a child, walked his family’s Siamese around London on a leash.

HIS mother read him eliot’s cat poems at bedtime and he’s been known to recite them in his head at times of stress.

In 1980, he approached theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh about his idea of turning the poems into a musical.

According to Mackintosh, after a long, liquid lunch at a Mayfair gentlemen’s club, they returned to Lloyd Webber’s flat. ‘He played me some of his settings of Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats and I went: “Oh, there’s something there,’ ” Mackintosh recalled.

At the time, few agreed. Aside from the premise of singing, dancing cats, there was barely even a plot.

‘It was a very fraught, very risky venture with everybody thinking that we were crazy for doing it — that it was going to be the biggest disaster in the history of musical theatre,’ said Lloyd Webber.

He added: ‘ We never knew whether the public was going to love Cats until the moment we saw

a cat go on stage . . . i remember sitting backstage waiting for the response. somehow, we got away with it.’

as it was, the London show ran for 21 years, providing each of its 240 original investors with £26.8 million over its entire run, a 60-fold return on their investment.

globally, it has played to 81 million people in more than 50 countries and in 19 languages. not surprisingly, hollywood has been trying to turn Cats into a hit movie for years (there was a 1998 version which was essentially the stage show on film) and initially even steven spielberg was interested.

Cats doesn’t seem the most obvious project for director Tom hooper, who cut his teeth on iTv’s gritty crime series Prime suspect and founded his reputation on intense and often dark films.

although the chief cat Old Deuteronomy is now female, among other modernisations, Cats has still fallen foul of the political correctness police after it was revealed Francesca hayward, who is mixed-race, plays a white cat and has a face of white fur.

The dancer shrugged off accusations of ‘white-washing’, insisting that ‘skin colour doesn’t matter when you’re playing a cat’.

whatever the fur colour, the filmmakers will probably just be happy if there’s no more talk of monstrouslooking moggies — and audiences prove to love the film.