It’s official, the “Cats” butthole cut did exist – briefly.
The Daily Beast has done some real digging, diving deep into a dark hole to deliver a report on the rumored earlier version of Tom Hooper‘s infamous adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical which opened at Christmas to awful reviews and atrocious box-office.
Last month came rumors that the characters originally had CG buttholes on their behinds and VFX artists had to remove them from some 400 shots before release. That was followed by another report which indicated that it was a quirk of the fur simulation technology that was used which results in some shots in which it “really REALLY looked like very furry lady genitals and buttholes by accident.”
According to the new report, “Cats” was halfway complete when someone finally noticed the buttholes. A source who worked on the film’s visual effects tells the outlet:
“We paused it. We went to call our supervisor, and we’re like, ‘There’s a f–king asshole in there! There’s buttholes!’ It wasn’t prominent but you saw it… And you [were] just like, ‘What the hell is that?… There’s a f–king butthole in there.’ It wasn’t in your face – but at the same time, too, if you’re looking, you’ll see it. There was nobody that said, ‘We want buttholes.’ It was one of those things that just happened and slipped through.”
The source confirms one of the artists was then charged with having to paint them out. Whilst it’s all amusing, the piece takes a dark turn and goes further into the working conditions on the film which sound deplorable. Dubbed ‘almost slavery,’ the artists put in 90-hour work weeks for months, often staying in the office for two or three days at a time.
Adding to the complication? Hooper himself. The source makes multiple allegations against the filmmaker saying he “has no idea how animation works,” he sent crew members individual emails denigrating their work, he refused to watch animatics so the artists had to fully render shots for his approval, and he even demanded “to see videos of actual cats performing the same actions the cats would do in the film.” It’s not clear who had to break it to him that cats don’t dance.
It reportedly took the team six months to produce the film’s two-minute trailer, leaving them with roughly four months remained to complete the entire film, and the film burned through multiple visual effects supervisors along the way all allegedly due to Hooper and the time crunch.
In the greater scheme of things, some CG anuses are the least of the problems with “Cats”.
