David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter felt that the film was "hobbled by a major misjudgment in its central visual concept" lamenting its execution (such as the poor proportions of the 'cats' to their environments) and deeming the film "exhausting".
In the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang wrote that "With its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing, Cats is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice."
Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian wrote a one-star review parodying "The Naming of Cats" that criticised the visual style and particularly the character design, while lambasting the film as a "dreadful hairball of woe".