Whatever else 2025 was, and it was a lot, it was a banner year to be a cat, or to love one. Felines did not merely turn up in the culture this year. They headlined it: winning the industry’s highest honor, colonizing every feed on earth, and, in one case, saying a goodbye that a genuinely global audience felt. Here are the seven cat moments that defined the year, roughly in order of how much they mattered.
A cat literally won an Academy Award
Start at the top, because a cat reached it. Flow, a dialogue-free Latvian animated film built around a wary gray cat navigating a flooded, seemingly post-human world, won Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. The story follows that cat as it reluctantly bands together with an over-eager Labrador, a standoffish capybara, a wide-eyed lemur, and a regal secretary bird to survive the rising water.
The win was historic on multiple fronts, the first Oscar for Latvia, and a triumph for a tiny team that made the film in the free, open-source program Blender on a budget a fraction the size of a typical studio release. Director Gints Zilbalodis has said the hero was drawn from cats in his own life, a former stray whose guardedness he built into the character. Back home, the film became a phenomenon; the capital even erected a sculpture honoring its four-legged lead.
The internet said goodbye to Maru
The year’s most-felt cat moment was a loss. If you have spent any time online in the last decade and a half, you have seen Maru, the round Scottish Fold from Japan whose entire brand was launching himself into cardboard boxes that were visibly too small. He once held the Guinness World Record for the most YouTube views of any individual animal, a channel that has racked up well over 500 million views.
In the fall, Maru was diagnosed with lung cancer, and he declined quickly. He passed on September 6, aged 18. His owner, known online only as Mugumogu, shared the news gently, imagining her famously laid-back cat relaxing somewhere up above and, in true Maru fashion, plotting one more surprise. The comments filled with a global chorus of grief, which tells you something about how much a box-loving cat can come to mean.
OIIA OIIA spun its way into your brain
If Maru was the year’s emotional low, the spinning cat was its purest hit of nonsense. The OIIA cat, a gray tabby digitally set whirling to an EDM-ish loop of vaguely vocalized “ooh-eeh-ahh” sounds, had simmered online since 2023 but detonated into full mainstream brain-rot in early 2025. By January it was inescapable on TikTok.
As with any good meme, its power was in the remix: people swapped in different cats, backdrops, and songs, and the format kept mutating. Even the director of Flow got in on it, spinning his Oscar-winning cat. The whirling tabby turned up at real-world raves and inside video games. Peak, useless, wonderful.
”Shop Cats” made working cats famous
The other internet-cat juggernaut of the year had a warmer heart. Shop Cats, a TikTok series that launched in late 2024 and exploded through 2025, has a simple premise: a host visits the resident cats of New York City businesses, bodegas, bookstores, breweries, and interviews them and their humans. She holds the mic up to the cats. The owners light up.
The show pulled in hundreds of thousands of followers and even took home a Webby, and its creator has said the best part is watching a shop owner’s whole face change when they start talking about their cat. What began as uncertainty about whether they could find enough working cats for a series turned into a flood of fan suggestions from every corner of the city.
The celebrity cat parents had a moment
Two of the year’s cat headlines belonged to famous humans. Taylor Swift, a longtime and very public cat mom to Meredith, Olivia, and Benjamin Button, found herself on unexpected cat-PR duty: her future in-laws’ kids had been told, mischievously, that cats are poisonous. By her account on the Kelce brothers’ podcast, the fix was simply to hand the children her exceptionally patient Ragdoll, Benjamin, who tolerates being held like a baby, and let the evidence speak for itself. Mission accomplished, with new cat converts.
And in a category invented seemingly for him, actor Dave Franco was crowned People magazine’s inaugural Sexiest Cat Dad, in a tie-in with a cat-treat brand, beating out a field of fellow famous cat guys. Franco, a lifelong cat person, joked that he had been quietly campaigning for the honor his entire life and only realized how unusual his devotion looked once every interviewer kept bringing it up.
The animated scene-stealer with a silly face
Finally, the year’s biggest animated hit had a secret feline weapon. KPop Demon Hunters was arguably the movie of the summer, and while the catchy songs and the girl-group-versus-evil plot did the heavy lifting, plenty of viewers fell hardest for the film’s big, derpy tiger. Tigers count, we don’t make the rules. A story artist behind the film has said the character was mostly rooted in traditional Korean tiger art, with a healthy dose of his own house cat mixed in, the stubby body, the neck, the little fluffy details, and the resemblance was close enough that he posted a side-by-side to prove it.
Seven moments, one throughline: 2025 was the year the cat stopped being the sidekick.
