The 5 stages of experiencing 'Cats' the movie

Back in July, James Corden uttered a statement in a Cats featurette that's been stuck in my mind ever since. 

"These are people, but they're cats," he says, looking slightly stunned, "and this is kind of blowing my mind."

At the time, I remembered it because it sounded ridiculous: Yes, James, that is the premise of Cats. It's called acting, and maybe you should learn about it if you're planning to do it.

Having seen Cats now, though, I understand. These are people. But they are cats. And it completely blew my mind. 

Welcome to the journey

To call Cats a cinematic experience unlike any other does not do justice to precisely how mind-meltingly bizarre Cats is. To say it must be seen to be believed is to undersell just how hard it is to believe it even once you've seen it. Cats is a movie to make you feel sky-high even when you're stone-cold sober, to push an otherwise even-keeled mind into Joker-like peals of hysterical random laughter. 

Does the movie "work" in the traditional sense, in the way that director Tom Hooper and his star-studded cast and crew probably intended it to? Not exactly. But I gave into its alien charms, and found myself on an emotional journey I never could have predicted. Follow me on my path below. 

Step 1: Curiosity

Having never seen the Broadway show, I went into Cats with only a vague sense that it sounded bananas. The very concept of a movie about celebrities playing cats via intensive dance training and cutting-edge digital fur technology sounded like an intriguing bit of big-budget madness amid a sea of samey blockbusters and prestige pictures following predictable formulas. 

So I approached Cats much in the same way that the cats of Cats approached the new cat, Victoria (Francesca Hayward), in the opening number: with caution, excitement, and no small amount of eagerness to figure out what its whole deal was, already. 

Step 2: Disbelief

But that was where my ability to relate to these cats ended, because Cats quickly turns very, very weird.

Within the first 20 minutes, Cats introduces: the dumbfounding concept of Jellicle cats, which are basically just regular cats with more specific rules; the concept of a Jellicle ball, wherein a single cat is chosen to ascend to heaven; a house cat (Rebel Wilson) who commands a small army of dancing mice and cockroaches with human-child faces; an evil cat (Idris Elba) with teleportation superpowers; and a playboy cat (Jason Derulo) who sparks the uncomfortable realization that all these cats seem horny as hell.

That's not even getting into how the cats look, which is like they've been caught in the middle of an Animorphs-style transformation. They have ears and tails that twitch like cat ears, and fur and whiskers that look fairly convincing — but also human faces and bodies. It's unsettling upon first glance, and still unsettling upon the thousandth.

All of this is way too much to process, but the joy and terror of Cats is that it doesn't really care that it's way too much to process. It keeps twirling and leaping and belting out show tunes, daring you to keep up while knowing damn well you can't. 

Step 3: Begrudging respect

Say this for Cats: It commits. Hooper and his team present every single element of Cats completely in earnest. There's no winking and smirking about how silly this all is, no half-assing the musical numbers to signal they're above it, no apologizing for the nonsensical nature of everything we're seeing. 

As a result, it's easy to get swept up in the world of Cats, however baffling it might be. The first half or so plays like the cafeteria scene in Mean Girls, as various cats show Victoria (and us) the ropes of Jellicle cat society — which cats have drama, which ones are bad news, which ones are feared or respected. The second half is overtaken by the Jellicle ball, as all these different cats show off for each other.

Say this for Cats: It commits.

The level of craft isn't always up to the intensity of the dedication. Hooper's worst habit is slicing and dicing the dance numbers to the point where it's hard to tell what's going on, undermining the hard work and skill of his own stars. And the sets, while lavish, make the cats look simultaneously too big and too small; turns out there's no good way to scale bipedal mammals to mimic quadrupedal ones.

But as Jennifer Hudson ugly-cries her way through "Memory," or Taylor Swift purrs her musical ode to Macavity (Elba), or Ian McKellen pretends to cough up hairballs, Cats becomes genuinely awe-inspiring. It's perplexing that all these people poured their blood, sweat, and tears into movie so singularly strange, but it's also touching, in a swing-for-the-fences kind of way. 

Step 4. Disbelief again

Fortunately for fans of outsize ambition, any time Cats threatens to slide into boring respectability, it runs up against the one thing about this movie that never stops being weird. Which is that, again, these are people, but they're cats. 

At my screening, the audience periodically broke out into contagious fits of giggling at moments that weren't overtly comedic. I can't speak to what others were thinking in that moment, but for my part, the feeling I was expressing wasn't so much contempt as the delirium that comes from extreme confusion. 

I'd be watching Judi Dench emote intensely, and then I'd realize all over again that she was doing so from under several layers of makeup, costumes, and CG meant to make her look sort of like a cat, and something in me would snap. The human mind is famously flexible, able to acclimate to even the most extreme situations. But watching Cats, I learned that mine has its limits.  

5. Euphoria

And yet, I can't deny the sheer exhilaration of seeing how far I could push my own imagination. Cats is a 110-minute exercise in disbelieving your own eyes, in feeling yourself becoming gradually unmoored from basic concepts like "time" and "space" and "reality." Have you ever wondered what it feels like to try and gaslight yourself? Watch Cats, and you might get a taste. 

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to try and gaslight yourself? Watch Cats, and you might get a taste.

In the final moments of the movie, a character addresses the camera directly for the very first time, to relay the crucial message that "a cat is not a dog." It comes just as the film seems to be winding down, which is to say just as the audience is preparing to put this chaos behind them and get their minds back in order before exiting to the theater. 

Instead, this number severed whatever tenuous connection to reality I still had. I gasped with laughter, I covered my face, I pulled at my hair, I clasped my hands over my mouth to keep from screaming. Cats had broken me, and I'd never felt happier.