Wonder Woman 1984's villain Cheetah (Kristen Wiig) has drawn several comparisons to the CGI cats from 2019's widely-panned musical Cats. Like the cats, Cheetah is a humanoid feline character created through CGI for the big screen. However, Cheetah looks much better than any of the animals featured in Cats for a number of reasons.
Cheetah is the alter ego of Barbara Minerva, a gemologist and zoologist who works with Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) at the Smithsonian. The film introduces Barbara as a foil to Diana - she isn't confident in herself and she is constantly ignored by others, while Diana exudes self-assuredness and is admired and respected by those around her. When Barbara encounters the Dreamstone, she wishes to become like Diana. Over the course of the film, she develops powers similar to Diana's while losing her humanity, an effect of wishing on the Dreamstone. She later wishes to become an apex predator and turns into a cheetah-human hybrid.
The CGI in Barbara's final form has drawn its fair share of criticism, with viewers stating that it resembles the special effects work in Cats. While it isn't perfect - Cheetah most definitely falls into the uncanny valley - Wonder Woman 1984's Cheetah CGI is nowhere near as horrifying as the cats from Cats. For a start, Cheetah only appears in one scene, whereas Cats is full of CGI cats from beginning to end. This means that the special effects team on Wonder Woman 1984 could focus more time and effort on fewer shots featuring Cheetah, while the team behind Cats had to extend their abilities across a larger cast of characters and longer total runtime.
Diana and Cheetah's fight scene in Wonder Woman 1984 also takes place at night in very dark lighting, which helps to hide any glaring errors or inconsistencies. Cats, on the other hand, places its characters in a variety of settings with different lighting designs, none of which help the cats look particularly good. The Cats actors are also performing complex choreography throughout the film, which increases the challenges the visual effects team faced even more.
Finally, Wonder Woman 1984 director Patty Jenkins opted to blend practical effects and CGI, a departure from Cats's solely CGI and motion capture approach. Jenkins knew from the development stages of Wonder Woman 1984 that Cheetah would be a difficult effect to pull off with just CGI, so she decided to put Wiig in partial prosthetics. This allows Wiig's performance to shine through more and prevents any of the strange disconnect of Cats, which featured design choices like animated ears attempting to emote along with the actors.
While Cheetah's execution may not be perfect, it is solidly above the CGI seen in Cats. The film industry may not have completely mastered creating live action anthropomorphic characters just yet, but these choices from Wonder Woman 1984 suggest better ways to go about it than seen in previous years.
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