Meowl is the widely used internet name for a cat-owl hybrid image that predates the Italian Brainrot wave by more than a decade. Visually, it is simple and memorable: the face of a cat placed onto the body of an owl, usually perched on a branch and staring directly at the viewer.
The image is not an AI creation and did not begin as part of Roblox or modern brainrot culture. Its documented origin is a Weibo post from April 28, 2013 by the Chinese user zhumaokele, whose display name appears as 猪猫可乐.
In that post, zhumaokele shared a set of edited cat-owl images rather than a single isolated character, under a Chinese caption that presents them as an owl collection and jokingly frames them as the "air force" of cats. The strongest available documentation comes from the surviving Weibo post and later archival work summarized by Know Your Meme.
Both point back to the same 2013 source. Know Your Meme identifies the face in the best-known image as that of the viral Chinese cat Melonpi, although some sources render the cat’s name as Guapi from the Chinese 瓜皮.
The owl body has also been traced there to a stock image of a barn owl that was previously hosted on SuperStock. Those details matter because they place Meowl firmly in an earlier era of handmade Photoshop meme culture: a cut-and-paste image joke built from existing animal photos, not a generative image from the AI era.
The meme spread internationally very quickly. BuzzFeed published a post about "owls with cat heads" on May 28, 2013.
The next day, on May 29, 2013, a Reddit user reposted a collage of the hybrids to r/funny. That Reddit thread is part of Meowl’s early history because commenters were already proposing names and joking that the image deserved its own subreddit.
In other words, the community naming and remixing process started almost immediately after the image crossed out of Chinese social media and into English-language meme spaces. Later reposts helped keep it alive: a 2016 9GAG post popularized the all-caps caption "MEOWLS," and Cheezburger also ran a compilation of similar edits that year.
By then, the image had already become one of those durable internet oddities that kept resurfacing whenever people wanted something both cute and slightly uncanny. A larger revival arrived in the mid-2020s.
Know Your Meme documents renewed circulation on TikTok, X, YouTube, and related platforms in 2024 and 2025. In that period, Meowl appeared in caption memes, eerie edits, slideshow jokes, and animated clips.
One especially visible trend paired the image with sped-up audio of "New Soul," which helped give Meowl a second life among younger users who encountered it not as an old Photoshop gag, but as a surreal reaction image with its own mood and sound. This revival is a major reason the image was later folded into Brainrot discourse.
In that context, Meowl fit perfectly: it was absurd, visually blunt, easy to recognize instantly, and funny precisely because it barely needed explanation. That said, origin and later fandom should not be confused.
Meowl was not originally created as an Italian Brainrot character, and it did not start inside Steal a Brainrot. It began as a 2013 Chinese internet image edit.
Much later, fan wikis, game communities, and Brainrot-index sites started treating it as an OG or proto-brainrot figure because it already embodied the same taste for strange hybrid creatures and deadpan nonsense. In Brainrot and Roblox spaces, Meowl is often grouped with other older meme entities as a legacy pick or OG-tier character.
That classification reflects retrospective fandom and game culture, not the original purpose of the image. There are also a few points where uncertainty should be stated plainly.
The date, creator handle, platform, and general composition of the image are well supported. What is less fixed is the naming history.
The original Weibo post presents a collection of cat-owl edits and does not clearly establish "Meowl" as the one official English name for the single branch-perched image. Different communities have called it Meowl, Meowls, Cat Owl, or Owl Cat.
Sources also vary between the romanizations Melonpi and Guapi for the cat whose face was used. Because of that, the safest factual description is that Meowl is the later, widely adopted internet and brainrot-era name for the most famous cat-owl image from zhumaokele’s April 28, 2013 Weibo post.
So the core identity of Meowl is straightforward. It is an early-2010s Photoshop hybrid from Chinese social media that traveled through BuzzFeed, Reddit, and meme aggregation sites, then found a second life in TikTok-era absurdist culture before being absorbed into Brainrot fandom.
Its staying power comes from how immediate the joke is. No elaborate lore is required to understand why it stuck: it is a cat, it is an owl, and the combination is just wrong enough to be memorable.
