‘Golden Kitty’ Awarded to Filmmakers at Walker Art Center Internet Cat Festival

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, wrapped up its wildly popular Internet Cat Festival last night (August 12) by giving the Golden Kitty award to Alana Grelyak and Michael Gabriele, creators of the winning film, Cat Behavior Finally Explained.

The winner was chosen by an online popular vote and the award was given by Will Braden, festival curator (and a former Golden Kitty winner himself for the film, Henry, Le Chat Noir).

Cat Behavior Finally Explained parodies the ever-popular MasterCard commercials that always ends by summing up the experience as “priceless.”

In this video, various cat behaviors are depicted, described, and awarded a set number of points such as scratching the couch, boxing local flora, annoying the dog, disturbing naptime, and trying to catch the red dot, the latter of which is deemed “pointless.”

The video—which doesn’t explain cat behavior at all— ends by urging cat adoption.

Photo by Anna Gulbrandsen.
Courtesy of Walker Art Center

Grelyak and Gabriele commented, “Our goal is to use humor to draw an audience that might have otherwise overlooked the topic.”

They said that the web series has allowed them to donate several thousand dollars and thousands of meals to stray cats.

Photo by Anna Gulbrandsen.
Courtesy of Walker Art Center

You can see the runners up here including Pavlov’s Kitty, Back Off (in which a cat startles a huge black bear), Brain Freeze, and Hover Cat.

Rachel Joyce, assistant PR director at the Walker, told artnet News 13,000 attended the festival this year, making it the largest festival yet.