Nyan Cat

Nyan Cat is a 12-frame pixel animation of a gray cat with a cherry Pop-Tart body flying through space and leaving a rainbow. Its best-known form loops the flight to a relentlessly cheerful Japanese vocal track, turning a tiny GIF into an audiovisual endurance joke and a symbol of early-2010s web culture.

Dallas artist Christopher Torres, known online as prguitarman, drew the hybrid during a Red Cross charity livestream after viewers separately suggested a cat and a Pop-Tart. He posted the finished animation to LOL-Comics on April 2, 2011 under the name “Pop Tart / Nyan Cat.” Torres later said his cat Marty inspired the character’s gray face.

The sound came from a different creative chain. Japanese producer daniwellP had released “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!” using the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku; a cover using the voice synthesizer Momone Momo supplied the version heard in the meme. On April 5, YouTube user saraj00n, Sara June, combined that cover with Torres’s animation and titled the upload “Nyan Cat.” That edit established the meme people remember.

The video moved through Tumblr, G4, CollegeHumor and countless reposts during spring 2011. Its perfect loop encouraged long versions, national and musical remixes, progress-bar toys and the website nyan.cat. YouTube briefly replaced the normal seek bar with a tiny flying Nyan Cat for the video in June 2011.

Games and apps turned the loop into a playable obstacle course, while fan artists rebuilt it in 3D, animation, crafts and cosplay. The design was simple enough to redraw yet specific enough to recognize after a few pixels: gray head, pastry body, rainbow tail and dark-blue stars.

Commercial use also forced questions about ownership. In 2013, Torres and Keyboard Cat creator Charles Schmidt sued Warner Bros. and 5th Cell over unlicensed appearances in the Scribblenauts games; the dispute ended in a settlement that allowed continued use. The case became an early example of meme creators asserting rights over images that the public often treated as ownerless.

In February 2021, Torres sold a remastered one-of-one Nyan Cat NFT for 300 ether, worth about $587,000 at the time. The sale connected an emblem of the open, remix-heavy web to the crypto-art boom and revived debate about authorship, scarcity and internet history.

The original saraj00n upload later became unavailable, and Torres directed viewers to an official Nyan Cat channel. The relocation did not erase the collaboration behind the phenomenon: Torres made the GIF, daniwellP composed the original song, the Momone Momo cover supplied the vocal, and Sara June fused image and sound. Nyan Cat survives because that fusion feels infinite by design.