Henri, le Chat Noir

Henri was a long-haired tuxedo cat from Seattle whose YouTube career began in 2007 as a film school project. His owner, filmmaker William Braden, produced a series of short black-and-white films in which Henri delivered French-language voiceovers full of dramatic existential despair — about his food bowl, his "white idiot" housemate cat, and the meaninglessness of being. The films, edited deliberately in the style of New Wave French cinema, became a sensation. Their tone — bored, philosophical, gently absurd — captured something the early viral animal-video era largely lacked. Critic Roger Ebert called Henri "the best internet cat video ever made". The character won the 2013 Webby Award for Best Online Film & Video, with Henri delivering a brief acceptance speech via video link, expressing only pénible indifference. Braden produced over a dozen official Henri films and several books, and Henri became one of the rare viral cats whose appeal genuinely came from creative authorship rather than coincidence. He died peacefully in 2017 at the age of seventeen.