If you miss your cat while you’re at work, you need only jump on YouTube for an instant fix of cute fluffballs in battle with dogs, stuffing themselves into boxes and curling up with gorillas. One of the most popular videos this year was of the cat protecting a child from an attacking dog.
Cats are one of the most enduring internet memes. The cat meme revolution began in the mid-2000s with a strange trend called cat buckaroo, where people posted photos of their cats covered in stationery. There was a video called the Kitty Cat Dance and images of Lime Cat and Serious Cat became popular. Then of course lolcats arrived on the scene with the now famous saying, ‘I can haz cheezburger?’
The internet has become a virtual cat park.
There’s now even a cat video festival in the US. Last year more than 10,000 people attended the festival put on by the Walker Art Foundation in Minneapolis. The winner of its inaugural people’s choice award, Will Braden, is this year’s curator. He’s the brains behind popular existentialist cat Henri Le Chat Noir.
However, Braden warns that not all cat videos are created equal.
‘It’s like lumping all the movies that happen to be filmed in one city together,’ says Braden. ‘They all have something in common, but they’re all over the map.’
He doesn’t believe you can compare Henri with a video of a cat falling into the bath by accident.
‘They’re both funny, it’s just they don’t really have much to do with one another.’
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Henri is now a cat celebrity, much like Lil Bub and Grumpy Cat. There’s a book, a dedicated website and legions of fans on Facebook. Braden has even given up his day job to dedicate himself to all things Henri.
There are many theories as to why cats are so popular on the web. Braden puts it down to the fact that dog owners can share their dogs with the world when they take them for a walk or go to the park. Because you can’t do this with cats, he says, ‘the internet has become a virtual cat park’.
The genesis of Henri Le Chat Noir came about through good old fashioned procrastination.
‘Henri was a creation when I was in film school. We were supposed to do a profile of someone as a film project. I procrastinated and I was running out of time so I decided I would do a profile of a cat and I would do a parody of old French New Wave films we’d been watching in school.’
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It’s hard to imagine giving up your day job to make cat videos. Braden says the success of Henri lies in the juxtaposition of a pampered house cat with the philosophy of existentialism.
‘In the animal world, being a pampered house cat in western culture is pretty much top of the heap for good gigs that you can get. So the juxtaposition of that with existential crisis I think is the absurdity is what people find funny.’
In one video Henri goes to the vet; he wants to share his disillusionment about the world and his growing sense of ennui but the vet just checks his ears. In another video he reflects on the peculiar nature of Halloween. ‘He points out that none of the costumes are actually scary because no one dresses as crippling self-doubt,’ says Braden.
There’s a strong element of projection in our penchant for these online animal personalities. Braden understands that not everyone likes this propensity to project our whims and desires onto four-legged creatures.
‘I understand the idea people have of not wanting to anthropomorphise animals, but really those are a lot of the same people that say we shouldn’t have pets at all. I don’t necessarily agree with that.’
Braden suspects Henri wouldn’t like this idea either.
‘I think he would probably say that we are the pets and the cats are in charge, which anybody who owns a cat knows is usually true.’
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Animal People delves into the complex relationship between humans and animals.