8 Best Pop Culture Cat Moments of 2025

This year has had ups and downs (hello, who hasn’t seen this garbage-fire news cycle?), but one thing has always remained certain: our love for cats.

Cats have dominated our psyches since Ancient Egypt and viral cat videos only make our love for these little stinkers even stronger. This past year was full of some pretty great pop culture kitty moments. From a historic Oscar win to the passing of one of the greatest internet felines of all time, here’s a look back on the biggest cat moments of 2025.

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Flow won Best Animated Feature.

This year’s winner of the Best Animated Feature Academy Award was Flow — a Latvian animated movie starring a gray cat navigating his way through a strange, flooding, post-apocalyptic world. Along the way, he meets and befriends several other animals, including an overly excited Yellow Labrador, a grumpy capybara, a curious lemur, and a regal bird. 

Director Gints Zilbalodis was inspired by two important cats in his life. 

“The hero cat is based on two cats,” he told Empire Online. “The first one is a cat I had in high school called Josephine. She was a stray when we found her, and for that reason, she kept her guard up. I guess the cat in the film had similar trust issues.” The other cat Zibalodis drew from was Josephine’s son, Oigars. Zibalodis says visually, the cat in the movie is more similar to Oigars but his personality is like Josephine’s. 

Flow’s critical success made it an absolutely huge hit in Latvia. The capital city of Rīga even installed a sculpture in the cat’s honor. 

OIIA OIIA (Spinning Cat) was all over the internet.

While this cat video originated in 2023, it really hit mainstream in late 2024 and early 2025. By January of 2025, the OIIA cat was all over TikTok. The videos usually feature a gray tabby cat named Ethyl, whose image was originally uploaded to a Facebook page for cats back in 2019. Set to EDM-sounding music, the cat spins while an electronic voice vocalizes what vaguely sounds like “Ooh, eeh, eeh, ahh” (hence the OIIA name). It became the ultimate brain-rot video for a while.

As with other internet memes, people swapped the cat out for different felines, put the cat against different backgrounds, or changed up the songs (or some combination of all of the above). Director Gints Zibalodis of Flow even made a version with the movie’s cat after winning the Oscar. The OIIA cat even made appearances at real life raves and in popular online game Fortnite.

KPop Demon Hunters’ derpy tiger won our hearts.

KPop Demon Hunters was probably the biggest movie of the summer. Was it the incredibly catchy songs? The impressive animation? The plot line about a girl group kicking butt? Or maybe it was it the very adorable big tiger with a silly little face.

It was definitely a mix of all of the above, but I don’t think we should discount the tiger from the equation. Tigers are big cats, so this totally counts as an important feline pop culture moment. Story artist Radford Sechrist was influenced by traditional Korean artwork known as Minhwa, which often features tigers. He was also inspired by his own cat, whom he co-parents with his wife, Maggie Kang, co-director of KPop Demon Hunters.

“I would say 90 percent based on the Minhwa artwork, which was incredible to reference and ten percent is our cat,” he told Salon. “For instance, the shorter body and shorter legs feel like our cat. A bit of the neck as well, how our cat has this fluffy bump.”

Sechrist posted a comparison pic of Derpy Tiger and his cat, Fluffy, and well… check it out yourself.

Taylor Swift’s cats faced a surprising challenge.

Taylor Swift has been an outspoken cat mom for years — her love of cats is the reason she agreed to be in the movie adaptation of Cats in 2019. (The less we say about Cats, the better). Her three cats — Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson, and Benjamin Button — are basically certified celebrities of their own. 

But Swift faced an unexpected challenge when she introduced her cat to future brother-in-law Jason Kelce’s daughters: Apparently, Kelce had erroneously warned his daughters that cats are poisonous. 

“It was actually really a great challenge, because as soon as I got the kids around the cats, it was my goal to prove to them that they weren’t poisonous,” Swift recounted on Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcas t.

Luckily, all her cats are very chill around children, she continued: “And there’s no better way to prove that than to just hand them Benjamin, my Ragdoll cat who lets humans hold him like he’s a baby.” She was successful: The girls often seek out Benjamin for cuddles now and may even be getting a cat of their own... one day.

Cats took over the world in this anime series.

From Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service and Sailor Moon’s Luna, cats have long been a staple of anime. But this year, a new anime series put a more macabre spin on things: What if cats took over the world?

Based on the popular manga of the same name, Nyaight of the Living Cat takes place in a world where petting cats turns people into them thanks to a mysterious virus. It takes all the tropes of zombie apocalypse stories and makes them fluffier and way more adorable. The most horrific thing about this world, though, is that petting cats turns you into one — so no more cuddles with your beloved kitty! The first season of the show is available to stream on Crunchyroll. 

Dave Franco was the sexiest cat dad.

People magazine is known for their annual “Sexiest Man Alive” title. But this year, in partnership with Temptations cat treats, the magazine introduced a “Sexist Cat Dad” category. There were four front runners — Myles Turner, Mark Ruffalo, Kumail Nanjiani, and Dave Franco — but it was Franco who clinched the coveted title.

In an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, Franco spoke about his lifelong love of cats and thanked all the cats who have been in his life. 

“I feel like I have been silently campaigning for this my whole life,” Franco said. “I never realized how rare it was for a man to be obsessed with his cats until every journalist brought it up in every interview I’ve ever done.” 

One of the internet’s biggest cat celebrities died.

If you’ve used the internet in the past decade, you’ve probably seen Maru. The Japanese Scottish Fold was one of the first viral cats and was known for squeezing himself into small cardboard boxes. In 2016, he held the Guinness World Record for most YouTube video views of an individual animal. That record was surpassed in 2018, but as of the time of writing, Maru’s channel still has an impressive 583,306,057 views. 

This past fall, Maru was diagnosed with lung adenocarcinoma. His condition deteriorated, and he died on September 6 at 18 years old. Maru’s mom, known only by her YouTube username Mugumogu, announced his passing with a post on the YouTube Channel.

“Around 1:00 PM yesterday, Maru rose safely into the sky,” she wrote. “‘I’m lonely, so be sure to be born again soon!’ I said to him insistently, but he is by nature a laid-back cat, and I wonder if he is relaxing in the sky now. But he loves to surprise us, so I’ll wait patiently, hoping for a surprise from him.”

Maru’s legacy lives on. Mugumogu has posted old footage of Maru and even an update where she cleaned out his bed. Many commenters have expressed their sympathies and grief in the comments. For old time’s sake, check out one of the earliest Maru videos from 16 years ago. 

Shop cats put the spotlight on hardworking cats.

TikTok series Shop Cats launched in late 2024 — and exploded in popularity. The show won a Webby for Best in Social Animals and has over 790,000 followers on TikTok.

The premise is pretty straightforward: Comedian Michelladonna visits various working cats around New York City and interviews them and their people. She’s gone to bodegas, of course, but also bookstores, breweries, and more. She holds the microphone up to the cats, interacting with them, and gushing over their cuteness. The business owners share stories and explain more about their beloved coworkers. 

Michelladonna told The New York Times that one of her favorite parts of doing the show is connecting with the shop owners, particularly the ones who own the bodegas. 

“Their faces change when they talk about their cats,” she said. “It’s my favorite thing to experience doing this show.” 

According to People magazine, Michelladonna and producer Drew Rosenthal were initially uncertain that they’d be able to find enough cats for a long-running series. But they quickly realized that wasn’t a problem. Now they get hundreds of suggestions from fans, urging them to check out different cats across the city.