How Jim Henson's Creature Shop recreated the famous feline.
Everyone's favorite frowning feline, Grumpy Cat, is hitting the small screen in her movie debut this holiday season. Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever, which stars Parks and Recreation star Aubrey Plaza as the voice of the famous cat, will premiere on the Lifetime network just in time for the holidays.
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While the real-life Grumpy Cat is used in most of the scenes of the movie, Lifetime reached out to Jim Henson's Creature Shop to create a few different puppet versions of the internet star to be used as stunt doubles and in some wider shots. Creature Shop Creative Supervisor Pete Brooke talked to ET about the steps they took to build the famous feline.
"We're actually going to do three versions for this movie," Brooke explained. "One of them is going to be the puppet version which will have rodded hands and emote in front of the camera, one is the stunt version is that we’ll shoot in the wide shots, and then the other version will be a rodded puppet and she'll be able to move in funny ways with the skills of the puppeteers."
First, the team measured every part of Grumpy Cat's body, right down to her signature frowning face, which is caused by a form of feline dwarfism.
"We also took reference photos of things like the eyes and the paws and the claws," Brooke told ET, explaining the precise steps taken by the Creature Shop to create a perfectly scaled model.
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Next, the team made a functional life-sized sculpture of Grumpy Cat, whose real name is actually Tardar Sauce.
"We'll take a mold and cast it up in foam latex and then we'll also make a fiberglass skull underneath there," Brooke explained. "That will house the mechanical elements, things like the eyes and the eyebrows moving, the ears twitching, and so on."
Finally, a synthetic fur is chosen and painted to match the precise shade of Grumpy Cat's fur, and whiskers and paws are added as finishing touches on the faux furballs.
Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever premieres November 29 on Lifetime.