Henri, le Chat Noir

Henri, le Chat Noir is an internet-famous tuxedo cat who stars in a series of YouTube short films in which a narrator voices the cat's philosophical musings, delivered in French with a film noir style. The character is the online persona of Henry, a rescued shelter cat living in Seattle, Washington, and the films are written, shot, and narrated by filmmaker William Braden.¹

Origin

Henri is the online nickname of Henry, an eight-year-old rescued shelter cat in Seattle. His human "uncle," filmmaker William Braden, created the first short film for a class project at the Seattle Film Institute, shooting, editing, and narrating it in eleven days. Braden chose a film noir style with French narration to express Henri's contempt for humans and for other cats, especially a nameless white cat who appears in the videos.¹

Le Chat Noir (French for "The Black Cat") borrows its name from a Parisian cabaret of the 19th century, remembered chiefly for the famous Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen poster showing a black cat on a red and yellow backdrop.¹ Braden uploaded the finished film to YouTube on May 24, 2007, and it had gained more than 1.6 million likes as of October 2012.¹

Spread and recognition

The first video went relatively unnoticed for several years until Henri was quoted on a personal Tumblr blog in August 2011. On April 6, 2012, Braden uploaded a second video, "Paw de Deux," which gained more than 6 million views in six months and was featured on Jezebel the following day. Throughout April 2012, Henri's videos were shared on College Humor, BuzzFeed, Forbes, The Daily Dot, and Metafilter, among other sites. Braden then set up a homepage, a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter account for Henri.¹

A third video, documenting a trip to the veterinarian, went live on June 20, 2012. Nine days later, a YouTuber named Lizzie Reid uploaded a love letter to Henri from another black and white cat named Anais Mittens.¹ The critic Roger Ebert declared "Henri 2, Paw de Deux" the best of the Internet's cat offerings, and the videos were prominent enough that Christopher Walken referenced them in an interview.³

Golden Kitty Award. In August 2012, "Paw de Deux" won the Golden Kitty award, the top award at the Internet Cat Video Film Festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Viewers chose it from 10,136 submissions, and it beat the Japanese cat Maru "by a landslide." Braden accepted the award, saying, "I don't think I've ever purred this loudly."¹

The series and its style

The episodes form a series, all playing on similar themes of Henri's boredom, loneliness, and alienation in the face of everything from birds and fellow felines to cheeseburgers.⁴ The persona is a cat who lives in luxury but is filled with ennui: in the book's promotional text, Henri declares, "My filtered water tastes impure and no food can satisfy the emptiness I feel inside," and states that he rarely purrs.² Reviewers responded in kind; The Guardian called Henri "our favourite depressed cat," and The Huffington Post described him as "one cat, one massive existential crisis. A feline Serge Gainsbourg."²

Braden has distinguished the films from ordinary cat videos, telling the San Francisco Bay Guardian that "there isn't much alike between an Henri video and a five-second grainy cell phone video of a cat sneezing and falling into a bathtub, other than the fact that they both have cats in them."³

Book and commercial success

Shortly after the Golden Kitty award, Braden announced a book deal for Henri, to be published by a Random House imprint.¹ The book, Henri, le Chat Noir: The Existential Mewsings of an Angst-Filled Cat, appeared as a 96-page ebook under the Virgin Digital imprint on July 18, 2013, with ISBN 9780753549247.²

In interviews following the announcement, Braden said he made approximately $1,000 per week from Henri's online merchandise store, enough to give up his wedding videography work and work on Henri full time.¹ The online gift shop features items such as mouse pads and mugs, and Henri's Facebook page became a community for cat lovers in which, Braden said, some people found comfort after losing pets.³ Braden also used Henri's popularity to raise money for cat shelters, $5,000 in 2012, with a stated goal of doubling that in 2013.³

Unlike some other celebrity cats, Henri did not make public appearances; Braden explained that Henry is "kind of a homebody" and that traveling would put him through aggravation for his owner's benefit.³

References

1. Henri, Le Chat Noir, Know Your Meme
2. Henri, le Chat Noir by William Braden, Penguin Books
3. Internet cats, in their own words: Henri le Chat Noir, San Francisco Bay Guardian (May 20, 2013)
4. Henri le Chat: à la Mode Retro, In Media Res (August 8, 2013)

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Comedy, drama, and general-genre web series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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