Simon’s Cat

Simon Tofield was aware that his bachelor days were about to end when his girlfriend and her six-year-old daughter moved in with him recently. But there have been two dominant females lording it over his household for some time — a nine-year-old tortoiseshell called Jess and a “ginormous” tabby, Maisy.

“Jess is a real one-man cat and an expert at getting her own way,” the 38-year-old illustrator says. “My girlfriend gets quite annoyed because Jess insists on sleeping on my bed and she’s very clingy to me.

“Maisy, who was a rescue cat, is more independent and very much an outdoor cat. But she, too, knows exactly what she wants. My third cat, Hugo, a black tom, is constantly put in his place by them.” Chuckling at the thought, he adds: “And so am I.”

And now there’s demanding moggie No 4, who is fast attracting a fan club of millions worldwide as the star of an animation on [ YouTube. Tofield, an illustrator and animator for commercials, dreamt up the character one morning “for a bit of fun” when he was trying out a new software package on his computer. The result was a one-and-a-half minute sequence inspired by the attempts of his youngest cat, Hugo, to wake him up that morning.

“I put it on my showreel I send to potential clients to get work,” he says. “I didn’t intend for anyone else to see it, so when a friend phoned me to say my cat was on YouTube I couldn’t believe it. I thought someone had stolen my work.

“I still don’t know who put the film up there, but it has been the best thing that has ever happened to me. So far, that first film has had more than ten million hits. I got to work on a second film straight away so that I could let people know it was my work. The best kick of all was knowing that so many others shared my sense of humour.”

Three more films followed, each one taking longer than the previous because Tofield does all the artwork himself; each second of animation can require up to 25 drawings. By the end of last year he had scooped several prizes, including Best Comedy at the British Animation Awards. Now his cat is the star of a book of comic sketches, out next month. The next step is a range of cat merchandise, including an Apple app, cards and T-shirts. There will also be a new film on YouTube in time for Christmas.

Tofield has been drawing cartoon cats since he was a child in Bedfordshire — he got his first kitten when he was 9 — and it’s his knack for caricaturing feline behaviour, coupled with a schoolboy humour, that appeals to children and adults alike. In the first film the cat tries everything he can to wake his owner — he climbs on his head, purrs, miaows, paws him. “Which is exactly what my cat Hugo was doing to me the morning I drew that sequence,” Tofield says.

Then the cat whacks him over the head with a baseball bat. That bit didn’t happen in real life, obviously. “But you can imagine a cat doing something like that if it could and that’s what made me laugh,” Simon chuckles. “When I wake up, all dazed and confused, the cat is curled up innocently at my feet. I love that constant one-upmanship. My cats get the better of me all the time.

“I see Simon [in the films] and his cat like Laurel and Hardy, with Simon, who is a caricature of me, the fall guy. The butt of the jokes. Cats the world over are so good at manipulating humans. A lot of the scenarios are familiar to all cat owners, so I can sit here in London and make a film inspired by one of my cats and someone in New Zealand might be laughing because it reminds them of their pet, Snowball.”

Unlike Garfield, the most famous comic cat to date, Tofield’s cat doesn’t have a name and doesn’t speak, other than to make the realistic purrs and “brrupps” provided by Tofield for the films. “I didn’t want to give him a human voice,” he says. “Cats have a language of their own and it’s the little nuances, the chirps as I call them, that really make this cat come alive. I also decided that the book shouldn’t have any captions. I like the images to speak for themselves. The humour is all in the eyes and the body language. Simon’s cat behaves just like a real cat, but with a touch of the schoolboy about him.

“Even people who hate cats have e-mailed to say they find themselves laughing,” Tofield says. “I get some really heartfelt e-mails, too,” he adds. “One was from someone suffering from depression who said that Simon’s cat made them laugh for the first time in a year.”

Tofield is clearly not as hapless as his comic alter ego on screen, but he is astonished by the success of his feline anti-hero. The day we meet he has just returned from a media training session to prepare him for his new notoriety, and he’s a little uncomfortable talking about himself to me for his first newspaper interview.

“The cat is the star really, not me,” he says. “All I know is I love sitting down, putting pen to paper and taking him on lots of adventures. I enjoy every minute because I never know where the next picture is going to take us.”