Evolution of Warrior Cat Animations

With Warrior Cat animations coming primarily from hobbyists and entirely without profit, its taken over two decades to reach this point where hobbyists can also utilize open-source programs like Blender to continue to create content. 

Using a mix of the previous origins and fast forwarding to 2018, this multiple animator project (MAP) was hosted by eighthsun [HITA] and with twenty-two total participants has now reached 11M total views.  While this MAP wasn’t the first of its kind it is still a staple in the timeline of Warrior Cat animations, it was well organized with a consistent timeline and identical character design models despite the changes in art style. Using the music from the Disney Channel show Tangled: The Series, this MAP focused on the most recent arc in the Warrior Cat books depicting a great battle between the classic tale of good versus evil. 

While Alli Kat and FlightyFootWarrior were the first two animators to dive into animated music videos for the Warrior Cats book series, SSS Warrior Cats was the first collaborative group of animators to put together episodes depicting the series chronologically. Directed by Wanton Fox in 2008, the small animated series only reached a total of three episodes with eight total videos with episode one reaching 3.9M views today.  Despite being only three episodes long, this would be the first collaborative project involving multiple animators and talents to create videos for the Warrior Cat’s franchise. It would spark up what is now known as multiple animator projects (MAP) in the following decade.

Following the surge in popularity Alli Kat’s videos were receiving, a new wave of Warrior Cat animators began to hit the YouTube video-sharing platform. FlightyFootWarrior (who now goes by Corvid Katana) was the next huge animator who solidified what the Warrior Cat art style would be for the next decade, her cat designs (along with Alli Kat) became a staple of the community and are still used to this day. Only two years after the launch of Alli Kat’s “Bones Shatter AMV” came FlightyFootWarrior’s own AMV titled “Scourge will not bow” with a staggering 1.8M views today.  Also using inspiration from Alli Kat and her usage of rock songs to animate Warrior Cats, these videos also depicted scenes from the first box set of the series “The Prophecy Begins”.

Despite Warrior Cats being released in 2003, it wasn’t until after the birth of YouTube in 2005 that there was a platform for fans to share their artistic creations. The first fan created video that went viral with other fans was created by Alli Kat on YouTube in 2008, her video currently holds 1.7M views and is an animated music video (AMV) depicting the final battle of the last book of the first book set. The style was influenced by Japanese anime as that was the only genre who received AMVs created by fans at the time, the music chosen is also a tribute to the time period, the song “Bones Shatter” by Hedley was an uplifting rock song that was unknown until the surge in views by this AMV.  At the time of creating this staple animation, Alli Kat was only thirteen years old and used Microsoft Paint and Windows Movie Maker as her mediums. The artist has also spoken about how much the attention of being the first renowned Warrior Cat animator affected her throughout the years in her video “AlliKatNya & The Early Days of Warrior Cats Animation (2006 - 2009)”.