The trailer for the live-action adaptation has shocked fans but, from Anaconda to Sonic, computer imagery in film has a patchy record

Cats trailer 2019

What it was

A horror, a horror movie, a singing violent horror.

What it looked like

What if all the muscles in your body clenched at once and the resulting mess of bones and ligaments spelled out, in bold red capitals, the word “CATS”? And James Corden was there, singing? What if that? This is not a nightmare. Check your eyes and know yourself to be awake.

How it made us feel

I feel like someone drained all the blood out and gave it to Judi Dench.

What happened

Sadly, inevitably, it’ll break box-office records and probably get an Oscar nod.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Water mess... Deep Blue Sea. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

Deep Blue Sea 1999

What it was

An essential entry in a long line of films in the genre “water’s scary, innit?”

What it looked like

A lot of the film was just Samuel L Jackson screaming at a wall placed behind the camera because it was easier to get him to act “the concept of something exploding” than actually rendering an explosion.

How it made us feel

Deep Blue Sea is actually a pretty great water-thriller, but it straddles a very precise moment in CGI history that is “right before it got good”. Animatronic sharks do the closeup work – like in the olden days! – then, for the more active and vicious death scenes, eerily floating and entirely unconvincing CGI enters the scene.

What happened?

Well, The Meg came out last year, which is basically “What if a shark got smart enough to headbutt its way into our research laboratory?” so essentially the same film will be made every 20 years until we die.

Anaconda 1997

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fangs for nothing... Anaconda. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia

What it was

A pre-J-Lo J-Lo vehicle starring Ice Cube doing his best “look out of the corner of his eyes and say ‘What the—?’” bit, Jon Voight at his sneering peak, and a snake made out of a Windows 95 screensaver.

What it looked like

“Snakes are just grey tubes, right?” – whoever rendered the snake in Anaconda, having never seen a snake and refusing to ever look at one.

How it made us feel

Anaconda was supposed to inspire tension and fear – a classic sleepover jump-and-scream – but throughout, there is a constant and palpable feeling that you are watching six B-tier actors scream at a tennis ball taped to some rope with an unscary snake drag-and-dropped in later by a nerd.

What happened?

It was a box-office success and somehow inspired four sequels, the latest of which was released in 2015, so what do I know?

The Polar Express 2004

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In training... The Polar Express. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

What it was

A brazen attempt by Tom Hanks to monopolise Christmas.

What it looked like

Shoots for: an illustrated Yuletide children’s book of yore, brought to life and put on a train. Lands in: why do all of these characters make my skin want to crawl off my body? What will I do without skin?

How it made us feel

Can never decide what is eeriest about every character in The Polar Express: the texturelessness of their faces? The stiff and unnatural way their arms and hands move? No, I’ve got it: it’s the way all of their jaws are hinged on wrongly. Like watching animals dressed in skin.

What happened?

I imagine we’ll discover the true traumatic impact of The Polar Express once the generation of children who were raised on it can finally afford therapy to talk openly.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2019

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bit of blue... Sonic the Hedgehog. Photograph: Paramount Pictures

What it was

Arguably the most doomed film in cinema history: 26 years after the first wave of Sonic-mania, and five years after the subsequent internet-driven horny fan art era, Paramount decided to make a CGI retelling of the Sonic legend with a hedgehog that looks as if someone embedded children’s teeth in a dog.

What it looked like

The initial Sonic trailer was proof of concept that CGI has gone too far: not only can computers now render, say, the small hairs on a forearm, it can now dive deep into my very darkest nightmares and extract them whole, putting them on screen for all to see.

How it made us feel

As if someone retconned my childhood to make it bad: it’s like someone’s told me Sunny D is actually owned by Putin and finger skateboards are Isis propaganda.

What happened?

Fans have pushed for a redesign (it’s not even that hard: make the body shorter, the eyes bigger, the lips less human, then cancel the film) and Paramount appears to have relented. The new nightmare sprints towards us in February 2020.