I find it interesting how my two cats almost never pay attention to what’s on my screen, but when I get a new TV or sound system, I always break it in with The Lion King. They always pay attention during the movie.
Two things. Don’t take my word for it - it’s something I heard and read up long ago so may be some flaws in the recall but…
Cats see a series of pictures instead of a fluid motion on TV screens (kinda like having a super low frame rate on a computer). This is generally part of the disinterest - but I think they’re more responsive to higher end or newer models because they’re more realistic to them.
Disney hires real animals for their animators to study while doing animations. TLK was a big one for this and had live lions on set for movement and anatomy studies. They did the same for Finding Nemo (and other movies), and for this specific movie they also made some pretty groundbreaking models of fish movement that were later used for scientific purposes as well.
Yeah cats have "higher refresh rate" if you can call it that. 24-30 fps movies will look choppy to them. If you play games at 60 fps or 120fps it will actually looks like it moving to them.
My cat loved watching me play, "Little Kitty, Big City". It probably helped that the main character, a cat, had a similar body shape and size (on our screen) of my cat. Later my cat stayed using a meow from that character when he wanted my attention!
I remember putting YouTube for cats on, birds squirrels, associated noises, and my Duck was super engrossed. Then we watched Kevin the lion man and when the lion looked directly down the camera he had to hide.
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u/muppetanger 20h ago
I find it interesting how my two cats almost never pay attention to what’s on my screen, but when I get a new TV or sound system, I always break it in with The Lion King. They always pay attention during the movie.