General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

Simon's Cat

Simon's Cat is a British animated web series created by illustrator and animator Simon Tofield, depicting the mischievous behavior of a fat white cat and his long-suffering owner, Simon. The first film, Cat Man Do, was uploaded to YouTube in March 2008 and went viral, turning a self-taught animation exercise into a global brand spanning online video, books, games, and licensed merchandise.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Created by	Simon Tofield, an English animator and director; first film Cat Man Do uploaded to YouTube in March 2008¹
Premise	The antics of a hungry, attention-seeking white cat and his owner Simon, told largely without dialogue²^•³
YouTube reach	Over 600 million views and over 3.4 million subscribers, the second most popular animation channel on the platform²
Total audience	Over 3 billion online views and 21 million fans across TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (2023)¹
Publishing	2 million books sold across 30 countries²
Games	Tactile Games holds long-term gaming rights; Crunch Time, Pop Time, and Story Time exceed 20 million downloads¹
Ownership	Simon's Cat Ltd founded 2008; majority stake acquired by Endemol Shine in 2015; now part of Banijay UK⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Simon's Cat is an anthology of self-contained shorts, each three minutes or less, each a small domestic catastrophe with a beginning, an escalation, and a punchline. Watching the series at speed means watching one cat perfect the art of getting what he wants.

The first film, "Cat Man Do," is the series in miniature and still its most famous episode. Simon sleeps in bed while his cat decides that breakfast cannot wait, and the film becomes a step-by-step escalation of feline persuasion. The cat begins politely, tapping Simon's face and pointing at his mouth, the character's signature gesture for "feed me." When patting fails, he tries louder tactics: batting Simon's eyelids, knocking objects off the nightstand, yowling directly into his ear. Each failure pushes him one rung up the ladder of violence until, at the end, he fetches a baseball bat and raises it over the sleeping man. Simon, half awake and apparently aware of exactly who is standing over him, finally stumbles to the kitchen and fills the bowl. The cat eats, the crisis ends, and the whole cycle is implied to resume the next morning.

From there the shorts branch out across the house and the garden. In "Let Me In," the cat sits at a window in the rain, demanding to be allowed inside, and Simon's hesitation costs him. In "Fly Guy," a housefly invades the living room and cat and owner destroy the furniture in a joint attempt to catch it. In "Snow Business," the cat meets snow for the first time and discovers the bird that survives in his garden all winter. In "Hot Water," a bath becomes a battlefield. "Fed Up!" was made for the RSPCA's Give Animals A Voice campaign and shows what happens when a pet is overfed, a rare short with an actual message tucked inside the slapstick.

The cast grows over the years. A kitten arrives, smaller, faster, and even more chaotic than the original cat, and the two form an uneasy alliance against Simon. Simon's sister appears with her dog, who is dimmer and more slobbering than any cat could ever be. A garden's worth of wildlife, birds, a hedgehog, frogs, wanders through as the cat's reluctant co-stars. "Off to the Vet," the series' first full-color film and its longest at around twelve minutes, gives the formula room to breathe: the cat, uncharacteristically fearful, must be taken to the veterinarian, and the film builds a full comic arc out of his dread and his eventual, grudging gratitude.

Because the series has no narrative ending, the last film is simply the newest episode rather than a finale. The cat is still hungry, Simon is still tired, and the door is still never shut quite fast enough.

Characters

Simon's Cat (voiced by Simon Tofield) is never named. He is a black-and-white housecat with infinite appetite, infinite patience for mischief, and a talent for looking innocent the moment something breaks. He is based in spirit on Hugh, Tofield's real cat, who inspired the first film and died in 2015. His signature move is pointing at his own mouth when he wants food, and his signature expression is the flat stare of a cat who believes he is the wronged party.

Simon (also Simon Tofield) is the owner, an animator modeled on Tofield himself. He is gentle, absent-minded, and permanently outmatched. He knows the cat is manipulating him and gives in anyway, which is the engine of most of the comedy.

Kitten (Simon Tofield) is the smaller, newer cat, based on Tofield's real cat Teddy. He is faster and more destructive than the original, and his arrival turns every scheme into a two-cat operation.

Simon's Sister's Dog (Simon Tofield) is a greedy, food-obsessed dog who stars in the RSPCA-commissioned shorts about pet obesity and serves as the cat's dim-witted foil.

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

The shorts spun off into a book series, beginning with the first Simon's Cat volume in October 2009, followed by Simon's Cat in Kitten Chaos on April 16, 2013, which introduced the kitten character in print with stickers and drawing tutorials. Korean editions followed, including a 2017 Kitten story book titled 입양고양이 대소동. The brand expanded into merchandise, an Apple app, greeting cards, T-shirts, and a mobile game, Crunch Time, launched in 2017 with Tactile Games. In 2023, the fifteenth anniversary was marked with classic films re-released in color, including a color remake of "Cat Man Do" uploaded in July 2023 when the channel hit six million subscribers.

Origin

Simon Tofield, born in 1971, learned to animate as a boy by making flipbooks, and grew up drawing animals, birds, and dinosaurs copied from wildlife books.⁴ Working as an animator and director at the London commercial studio Tandem, he set out in 2007 to teach himself Adobe Flash, then widely used in commercials. As a practice project he animated a short film about his kitten Hugh, who that morning had been jumping on his head and batting at his nose to wake him for breakfast.⁶^•⁷

The result, Cat Man Do, shows a hungry cat resorting to increasingly desperate measures to wake its sleeping owner. Tofield uploaded it to YouTube in March 2008 without planning a series; it went viral, and after the second film, Let Me In, he incorporated Simon's Cat Ltd.⁴^•⁶ Within about 18 months the first six films had passed 35 million views, and by July 2012 the channel had reached 269 million views on YouTube.⁸^•⁹ By the 15th anniversary in 2023, Cat Man Do alone had amassed 65 million views.¹

Production

The films are hand-animated frame by frame even though they are made on computer software; a single second typically requires 12 to 25 drawings. The series began in Adobe Flash, moved to TV Paint for later films, and uses CelAction for the most recent ones.¹⁰ A one-to-two-minute YouTube film takes 7 to 9 weeks to produce, excluding development, a pace the studio maintains deliberately rather than adopting faster, cheaper methods.¹¹

The early films were black and white, in a minimal line style derived from Tofield's ballpoint doodles. In 2015 the series made its first leap into full color with the 11-minute special Off to the Vet, funded through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign; the completed film was later released in full on YouTube and became one of the channel's most popular works.¹²^•⁴ The channel's output also includes Simon's Cat Logic, an informative series on why cats behave as they do, drawing tutorials, and behind-the-scenes features.¹³

Characters

The cast centers on the unnamed fat white Cat, his sidekick the Kitten, and owner Simon, with recurring characters such as the garden rival Jazz and the feral kitty Teddy appearing in the color specials.¹¹^•¹⁴ Tofield voices the various characters himself. He has said the Cat is based on a combination of the traits of all the cats he has lived with; he has owned six, starting with Shelley, adopted from a local farm when he was about nine.³^•¹⁵

Commercial development

The series monetized early. By 2011 Tofield had leveraged the character into bestselling books, a comic strip in a national newspaper, and a line of merchandise, hiring a full-time brand manager as the studio grew.¹⁶ The first book appeared in 2009 and went on sale in more than 23 countries.⁴^•⁸ In August 2015 Endemol Shine, the company behind Big Brother, acquired a majority stake in the London-based production firm, with plans to expand the franchise into television, publishing, licensing, and marketing; at that point the channel had 3.5 million subscribers and over 650 million views.⁵ The brand now sits within Banijay UK.²

Gaming became a major category. Working with Tactile Games, the studio launched Simon's Cat: Crunch Time in 2017, followed by Pop Time and Story Time, which together passed 20 million downloads, and Tactile Games later took the long-term gaming rights for the brand.⁴^•¹

Milestones and recognition

Cat Man Do won Best Comedy at the British Animation Awards in 2008, and the series has also received YouTube's Blockbuster Award.⁶^•¹⁷ The channel passed one million YouTube subscribers in 2013, released its 100th short film in 2020, and marked its 15th anniversary in 2023 with colorized compilations of classic films, a new website, and anniversary merchandise.⁴^•¹ The series remains in production, running to 19 seasons and more than 300 episodes on YouTube, with new films and 4K remasters of early classics released on a continuing schedule.¹⁸

References

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 › Early English-language web series (1997–mid 2010s)

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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Simon's Cat

Spoilers

Plot

Characters

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

Origin

Production

Characters

Commercial development

Milestones and recognition

References

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