I wasn’t going to write about Cats. What’s the point, when this maligned movie musical has already been torn so many new assholes that it’ll require incontinence care for the rest of its nine lives? Why join the failure gawkers and riffers whose only cultural contributions are taking limp-dick potshots at films so bald-facedly bad even Joe Schmoe can figure out what went wrong? I had nothing to add to the Cats conversation, and therefore nothing to write. But then, I got mad about Cats, and I got mad about reviews of Cats. So here I am. Writing about Cats.

To be clear, Cats is a nightmare. It is a vision of hell; a movie so batshit and so bugfuck that it is accidentally one of the most radical Hollywood films of the last decade. It is uncanny, it is awful, and it is hilarious. Someday, Cats will be two vast and trunkless paws of stone, left to stand in the desert of infamously failed films. For now though, it is fodder for every rat-brained reviewer who prays to the ghost of Daddy Ebert, hoping someday such a film will stumble along and allow them to simper out their snark. They’re among us, even now.

Cats provides such clunking keyboard clackers with the easiest of easy targets to express their ridicule: furries. Perennial shorthand for sexual degeneracy and lifestyles outside the norm, furries are the scapegoat, scapetiger, or scapedragon every time some off-kilter piece of animal media rolls along. This tepid sentiment allows The Telegraph’s reviewer to deem Cats a “semi-pornographic fur fetishist’s fever dream,” which is akin to claiming cuckold fetishists would get off to The Room.

The suggested sexuality of Cats is an elephant in the room; a big, allegedly horny pachyderm that no reviewer seems fully able nor willing to address. It is gestured towards, or ridiculed, but mostly taken for granted that somewhere, there must be, has to be, furry perverts getting their rocks off to this movie of perpetual middle-stage Animorphs. As a film writer who happens to be a furry, or as a furry who happens to write on films, the concept that any furry would be horny over this version of Cats is absolutely, positively, undeniably impossible for me to believe. So let's get into it.

Unlike its stage progenitor, Cats is too grounded to be camp. It’s a fully realized artistic vision, but that vision is one of twelve-inch-tall desaturated beast people cavorting about the real, recognizable world. This baffling adherence to our human existence paints every pop of style and remotely intentional creative choice as uncanny and intrusive. Cats is cinema of disruption; a work hell-bent on jerking viewers back to reality at every possible opportunity. Just when you’ve gotten acclimated to the jangling opening number, you see the first full-frontal cat and are immediately shocked to your senses by this crawling, half-human nightmare which your subconscious knows should not exist. And just when you’ve gotten used to that, the film takes a stab at turning you on.

Cats’ idea of horniness is so alien it leaves me completely slack-jawed. What this movie posits as erotic is so disturbing that it would include a content warning on most hentai sites. With the two campiest, raunchiest numbers from the stage production neutered to milquetoast messes, Cats decides instead you’ll get hot and bothered by CGI mice with giant dump-truck asses and the faces of children. It postulates that you’ll be pulling pud later while fantasizing of a scene where Rebel Wilson scratches her inner thigh with her legs spread open to an enraptured audience. It makes the bold decision to clothe Idris Elba for the entire film, only to have him appear nude in the final scene with fur the shade of his actual human skin. The fact that he lacks nipples only makes it that much more upsetting.

Somebody involved with Cats absolutely wanted the film to be sexy. But much like the uncanny line between a human face and a cat body, there’s no easy border to draw between what is meant to be sensual and what isn’t. The movie’s erotic teases are so poorly applied and so baffling that they turn the entire film into a game of psychosexual chicken - is this actually horny, or just weird? There’s no sly wink and sense of fun like with the original musical, or say, Rocky Horror Picture Show. Instead, Cats is an inscrutable sex toy; a too-curved, bumpy and multi-pronged thing which has no concievable function. Its presentation of lust is so foreign and disquieting that it sets my primal, reptile brain on fire: you should NOT fuck this, lest it behead you.

That’s why if you’re pinning the mutant sex drive of Cats on furries, I can only assume your conception comes from the one episode of CSI. If we’re going to be pegged as weirdo perverts, can’t you at least ascribe us better taste? You didn’t ask for this, but neither did we. You think we’re out here being fuckfreaks online because Taylor Swift’s face got grafted onto a leopard costume? Please. I didn’t waste my most formative years on DeviantArt just to have some rock-brained film nerd who thinks thigh highs are kinky point their finger at me after they couldn’t find a better punchline. I guarantee you none of us are feeling funny when we see Judi Dench in a fur coat.

The horniness fails to connect partially because Cats renders the very concept of sexuality queasy and uncomfortable, like going through puberty all over again. I’m convinced that whatever pervert would legitimately find Cats erotic is one this film will invent wholesale. I cannot name another furry who considers this movie anything other than a Cronenbergian horror burbled up from some dark, unquiet mind. No furry on earth is going to cash in their current spank bank for this tragedy, and Cats’ constant motions at traditional eroticism are so grotesque and stunted I can’t buy that any non-furry would be turned by these frankencreatures.

Now, I’m not saying furries will dislike Cats. I think other furries will love Cats, for similar reasons to most people. It’s evident the film harbors zero conception of what makes furries visually appealing in the first place, something even the stage version got right. Furry characters typically target a synthesis between animal and human elements to exaggerate personality traits, an ethos present in cartoons since the dawn of time. Cats simply rips a can of computer duster, says “fuck it,” and goes to town. I can only assume copy-pasting human faces has to do with the actors’ marketability, but it’s a hilarious decision which places the film alongside Howard the Duck and Foodfight! in the Hall of Anthropomorphic Animal Infamy.

That’s why I think furries are the target audience for Cats after all. It’s a more ironic appreciation than F-tier jokesters would prefer, but irony is how bad movies get famous. Non-furries can and should enjoy Cats, as it is a film where absolutely every element goes totally awry. Everyone should see it, but just know that you can’t blame us for this one. If it was really the ghoulish shit furries are into, I would understand the hate. I would hate me too if I had to jerk off to James Corden stuffing himself with literal garbage. But hey, if Cats actually awoke something in you, I promise there’s better content to be found. You haven’t seen anything yet.

I Promise, Furries Aren’t Horny For CATS