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SEATTLE
— Henry is a difficult star, but filmmaker William
Braden knows how to work with him.
If
he needs Henry to run, Braden stands behind him and
shouts to scare him into action. If he wants Henry to
look annoyed, Braden blows in his face. If Henry won’t
cooperate, Braden bribes him with catnip and Friskies
Party Mix.
Over
the last six years, Braden and Henry have developed a
special relationship. Braden makes YouTube videos in
which Henry plays a French existentialist named Henri.
The two-minute videos of the black, fluffy cat with
particularly long whiskers are Internet sensations,
viewed more than 10 million times.
"Henri
2: Paw de Deux," the most popular of Braden’s cat
videos, recently won the Golden Kitty, a people’s
choice award at the Internet Cat Video Film Festival.
The award, a statuette of a fat golden cat, sits on a
shelf next to the filmmaker’s desk.
He
has signed his first book deal. "Henri Le Chat
Noir: The Existentialist Musings of an Angst-Filled
Cat" will be published by an imprint of Random
House next year.
He
gets about $1,000 a week in revenue from his online
store, selling Henri mouse pads, mugs and T-shirts to
the existentialist cat’s devoted fans.
Braden,
32, used to work as a wedding videographer, but he is no
longer accepting wedding gigs. He doesn’t need to.
"These
past few months I’ve transferred to Henri full
time," Braden says. "I know how crazy it
sounds to have this depressed French cat be my primary
source of income."
———
Even
Thomas Edison found cats worth filming.
The
first cat video was created in 1894, when Edison’s
film studio produced a 20-second moving picture for his
newly invented kinetoscope. "Prof. Welton’s
Boxing Cats" featured two cats in a miniature
boxing ring wearing boxing gloves. The Library of
Congress uploaded the video to You Tube in 2009, and it
has been seen more than 200,000 times.
No
one can say for sure why cat videos attract such an
enormous following, but Emily Huh, editor in chief of
Cheezburger, a website of humor blogs, has a theory.
"Dog
owners have a dog park where they can show off their
dogs, but cat people don’t have that," she says.
"The Internet is where people who love cats can go
to say, ‘Look how cute my cat is.’"
Henry
made his Internet debut in 2006 when Braden was a
student at the Seattle Film Institute. Braden was
house-sitting for Henry’s owner in North Seattle when
he got a class assignment to shoot a profile. He thought
it’d be funnier to do an animal. Henry, who was
easygoing and had a malleable face, came immediately to
mind.
"He
kind of looks stoned all the time, but that face is a
blank slate," Braden says.
Braden
got the idea of parodying the European experimental
films of the 1940s and ‘50s that he was watching in
his film history class. His feline video
"Henri" earned him an A and was a big hit with
his fellow students.
It
racked up 300,000 page views shortly after it went up on
YouTube and is still being shown in class as an example
of how a good film can be made with very little money.
In fact, Braden says there is no cost to make the videos
except for his time and what he already spent buying the
camera and the editing software for his videography
work.
Six
years later, egged on by his friends and family, Braden
decided to revisit the Henri character, with another
short film, "Henri 2: Paw de Deux."
The
video features Henri in various states of repose as a
piano gently plays in the background. A throaty French
speaker (Braden, actually) gives voice to Henri’s
ennui.
"I
am free to go, yet I remain," the English subtitle
reads as Henri is shown gazing sullenly out the window.
Later he catches himself in a bathroom mirror and
observes, "We cannot escape ourselves."
Henri
is not the most popular cat on the Internet. That
distinction belongs to Maru — a kitty from Japan with
an unusually large head and a deep affinity for
cardboard boxes. A collection of Maru YouTube videos has
been seen more than 163 million times, making him the
most watched cat in the world. Maru even has his own
agent.
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Maru’s
owner, who is notoriously publicity shy and is steadfast
about remaining anonymous, says she started a blog to
record his growth. In the beginning, each post was just
a photograph and a sentence.
"However,
I was not able to record Maru’s charm only with
photographs," she wrote in an email. She took
videos of him, posted them to YouTube and embedded them
on the blog, and watched in wonder as Maru’s YouTube
channel became the seventh most popular in Japan.
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Cat
videos are so popular that they have spawned their own
festival. This summer, the first ever Internet Cat Video
Film Festival drew more than 10,000 people from all over
the country. Some brought their cats; others wore kitty
costumes.
Katie
Hill, a cat lover working at the Walker Arts Center in
Minneapolis, came up with the idea for the festival. She
sorted through 10,000 cat video submissions before
whittling the entries down to an hourlong collage.
When
she asked people around the world to vote for their
favorite, "Henri 2" won, and Braden was there
to collect his fat golden cat.
———
Braden
lives alone. He doesn’t have a cat, although he thinks
about getting one. On his right arm is a tattoo of a
black cat from a late 19th century poster advertising Le
Chat Noir nightclub in Paris.
He
and his muse live five minutes apart. He runs his
growing Henri empire out of a 625-square-foot studio
condo in Wallingford, Wash., where his view of the Space
Needle has been obstructed by new construction.
The
most luxurious item in the minimalist apartment is a Mac
computer with an enormous screen. It was Braden’s
first big splurge with what he calls "cat
money."
Every
morning, he opens his Facebook to concoct an existential
reflection that goes out to 52,000 followers of Henri,
also known to his fans as Le Chat Noir.
"Someone
asked me if I love my caretakers," he writes in
Henri’s voice. "Love is a strange thing, and
mostly indefinable. I sleep in their laundry basket, if
that counts."
Henry
is an 8-year-old tuxedo cat with a regal white chest. He
was adopted as a kitten from the Seattle Municipal
Shelter. He lives with his owner and three other cats in
a modest two-story house in North Seattle. His owner, a
close relative of Braden, asks that she not be
identified. She is worried that someone might kidnap
Henry.
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When
the weather is nice, Henry spends most of his time
outside, hiding under the trees and bushes around his
owner’s grassy front yard. Henry’s owner describes
the cat as a "gentle hunter." He’ll often
bring birds and small mammals back to the house, but
they are almost always alive.
During
one of Braden’s frequent visits, Henry’s owner
carries the cat into the kitchen, where he makes himself
comfortable on the table, purring as Braden strokes his
back.
"He’s
very relaxed, and I would say very happy," the
owner says. "He’s affectionate but he also keeps
to himself. He purrs easily, but he doesn’t like to
sit on laps."
Her
other three cats, including a snowy one named Ed White
who shows up in the Henri films as "L’imbecile
Blanc" or "the white imbecile," run off
and hide. Henry is the only one of the four who likes it
when people come to the house.
"It’s
kind of surreal to me that 50,000 people have friended
my cat on Facebook," Henry’s owner says, gazing
at her cat with affection. "He knows he’s in a
good place, but there’s no way to convey to him how
many people know of him."
Braden’s
Halloween Henri video – L’Haunting — premiered
Oct. 30.
Filming
usually takes place in the relative’s house. (Henry’s
owner donates her cat’s time to Braden.) It is short
but challenging. Henry tends to call it a day after
about 20 minutes. Braden tries to bother the cat as
little as possible, often shooting with a long lens, as
a wild animal photographer would do. Occasionally he
reverses a shot so it looks as if Henry is turning
toward the camera when he is actually turning away.
"That
is what $40,000 of film school will get you," he
says.
It
takes Braden less than two weeks to make an Henri video.
He films for three days, then spends about a week
editing the footage and adding sound. He writes about
half the video, about one minute of content, before he
starts shooting. He wants to leave room for inspiration.
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Braden
knows that his life with Henri won’t last forever. At
some point Henry will die, but even before that Braden
fears he will run out of ideas.
"When
I start shooting him against a green screen for a film
about Henri in space, that’s when we’ll know it’s
over," he says.
For
now, though, he tries to think about the future as
little as possible. If the first Henri book sells well,
he’d like to write a second one.
And
if that sells well, he’d like to use some of his
"cat money" to fund a different film project
— either a feature-length comedy set in Seattle or
perhaps a Web series, starring people.
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