>>5848First I was like: I don't care about this movie.
Then I was like: "Idris Elba? You motherfuckers."
Compared to even Ready Player One it loses out, not to mention Hermione from Chamber of Secrets (15 years ago!) Same thing with the new Lion King.
To explain it a bit better, the problem we struggle with is that of uncanny valley and how personifying works. Seeing an animal with human traits (including, for example, a human face) can be fine if done tastefully, though extreme care must be taken to not hit on that uncanny valley, a concern not present when it's an animal face. This divide is only worsened when, in the case of Cats, it's humans in crappy CGI outfits pretending very poorly to be cats. They kept each actor's face present enough that they were individually identifiable as their human, so we the audience suffered given the inability to separate Taylor Swift from the character, resulting in what basically amounted to seeing popular celebrities licking their crotches and pretending to be cats in horrible CGI outfits. When you fail to take away that distinctly human element in such a motion, it struggles to come off as anything more than erotic and horny.
To expand on this, your first example is very well-done and looks great, but if I were to see a video of him, otherwise as a human, pawing at the ground and butting horns with another person also in a similar get-up, it would probably come off as looking like two dudes being horny, like they're a pin-drop away from locking lips, Andrew Hussie fashion. Seeing animals act like humans is cute, seeing humans act like animals is a bit less so.