About

Thank you for finding this page. I don't expect many people to even bother opening it.
This might be TL;DR, sorry about that.



What is the 'Anime Cat Project' about?
My objective is to collect all instances of cats in Japanese anime into a single, easy-to-navigate website.


Why?
I watch a lot of anime and I like cats.

Back in 2014, I did a Google search for “anime cats”. I was disappointed at the lack of a proper website dedicated to such a topic – no Facebook page, no dedicated subreddit, no tumblr, not even a usable #AnimeCat hashtag.

So I decided... why not?


What counts as an anime cat?
  • It must be from a Japanese Anime (3D is fine too), so no other types of cartoons or animations
  • It must be a cat or characters need to say that it is a cat (e.g. Pannya) with good reason
  • If it is not obviously a cat (e.g. anthropomorphic), it needs to be sufficiently cat-like
    • Photos or imaginary cats count
    • Cat-shaped objects like stuffed animals do not count
    • Cat robots may count
    • Cat demons like nekomata may count
    • Cat girls may count


How did you find so many anime cats?
  • I asked friends to contribute.
  • I did a ton of internet keyword searches and found some nice resources. Anime Blogs, Character Databases, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikis, together with reverse Google Image Search. Google Translate was useful for digging stuff up in other languages. 
  • I watched a LOT of anime and found many of them myself. I had to deal with genres that I didn't like, for cats. Seriously. 
    • I also wrote code that takes a video and takes a screenshot every 2s and saves it as a giant thumbnail and looked at that instead of watching some whole episodes
    • Otherwise, I just take a screenshot every time I see a cat


Do you understand Japanese?
Yes, and no. I am not Japanese. I did have at least 8 years experience of watching anime subbed before attempting to learn properly. I read a textbook, played some games, checked a dictionary a lot, then went for some beginner classes. I realized I was way ahead of my class, then decided to self-study. Right now I'm somewhere between N2 and N1 level in reading, comprehension and listening, but I can't really hold a very good conversation or write much of an essay.

I can watch anime, read books and play games in Japanese without much help unless it gets too technical.


You made this site yourself?
I hacked this website together from a Blogger template, used some code from the interwebs, and did some of my own javascript/css magic on it.


Are you intending to make other Anime Animal websites (e.g. AnimeDogProject)?
Sure. I did take 2 years to gather data for my cat version, so maybe in the future.


Why watermark the pictures?
Er... Just me being paranoid that someone would re-post without attribution. I know it is quite pointless because you can just crop it off most of the time. If you want any screenshot without the watermark, do a reverse image search, watch the show yourself, or just ask me for it.


Why do images have white pillarboxes? It looks ugly.
It is to optimize the images for Facebook (1.91:1) and Twitter (2:1) feeds so that the full images appear without being cropped out.


Why no animated gifs or videos?
Animated gifs are time consuming to make have significantly larger file sizes, and don't auto-loop on certain media, and may look nice on one media but not another (see Twitter vs TweetDeck). Videos without much editing are very likely to be considered copyright infringement, especially with automated copyright detection (I tested a few, and got Youtube takedown notices already).


I found a cat that you don't have!
Look over here and contact me, thanks.



How do I contact you?
Look over here.


- NekoShinshi