A Catgirl is a character that looks mostly like a human but she has the ears of a cat. A Cat Girl is not furry, and should still have human skin, human hair, a human face, a completely human nose, and a human skull and torso structure. The Cat Girl is stereotypically female, though examples of Cat Boy can also be found.
Catgirls can also have other minor feline features, such as a cat tail, Cute Little Fangs, cat-like Animal Eyes, Femme Fatalons or actual claws. She often has personality traits that conform to feline Animal Stereotypes. She might also have a Verbal Tic that imitates the sound of a cat. They might demonstrate a Faux Paw.
Some catgirls are biologically Catgirl, either because of some degree of non-human ancestry or because of a change brought upon by Magic and Powers or Applied Phlebotinum. Examples do not have to be defaultly Catgirls. They can be normal humans who have been turned into Catgirls. These catgirls would be a subcategory of Unusual Ears and Little Bit Beastly.
Other Catgirls merely wear cat-themed costumes, sometimes as part of feline themed Animal Motifs. These Catgirls would be a subcategory of Animal-Eared Headband. Faux kitties will wear at least fake ears, and often a fake tail. Sometimes they wear gloves resembling cat paws.
A catgirls' ears and tail don't have to be that of a housecat. They can be that of any cat species, big or small.
Related Tropes
See Sprouting Ears for examples of characters that do not normally have cat ears being temporary drawn with cat ears because of the use of Super-Deformed art to emphasis certain emotions or character traits. If these characters never actual have actual cat ears, whether they be biological or a Cat Eared Headband, they should be listed under that trope, not on this page.
Not to be confused with the Cat People films, the Cat Person series of Internet shorts or Feline Female (about female cat, male dog pairings). Also nine times more likely to die young from curiosity than to live long enough to become a Crazy Cat Lady.
Special Note - Being female and feline is not sufficient to qualify for this trope. Do not add an example here without first making sure that it doesn't belong under another trope instead.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
Far too many anime series to list here. Wikipedia (seriously) has a decent, but still incomplete list.
Biological Unusual Ears
The series Geobreeders has an entire race of these that mess with electronic equipment and walk through walls. Needless to say, they are seen as bad.
Maya seems to be the only one who isn't evil, but she can't exactly talk either.
Tsukiyomi Ikuto from Shugo Chara! has a catboy as his guardian chara, and therefore being a catboy represents his inner would-be self. Sometimes Ikuto himself has cat ears just like his chara as part of his Chara Change.
Ichigo from Tokyo Mew Mew is a Magical GirlCat Girl with infused cat DNA. Although she does not have cat ears full time, they are real.
Mia Ikumi's earlier one-shot manga, Tokyo Black Cat Girl, from which TMM was supposedly derived, also featured a magical catgirl as the protagonist.
Yayoi of Neko-de Gomen! ("Sorry, I'm a cat") had her DNA scrambled with a cat's in a The Fly-style teleporter accident. She sprouts cat ears and tail at inopportune moments, suffers from cat-style estrus, and sets off her love interest's cat fur allergy.
GeGeGe no Kitaro has Neko-Musume, who leans more towards a horror interpretation of this trope.
Loveless is set in a world where everyone — males and females alike — have cat ears (and tails) until they lose their virginity. Some people wear fake ears to disguise their non-virginal status.
Himari from Omamori Himari is a samurai catgirl Magical Girlfriend. She speaks in an old-time dialect. Notable is one scene where she uses her cat features while at work in a Maid Cafe to her advantage - everyone thinks it's just a costume. However, Yuuto's allergic to cats, so that's slightly problematic for her.
Chrono Crusade has Shader, a cat-demon. She still looks basically like a catgirl, however, only with odd markings on her face and horns on her head.
Aisha ClanClan from Outlaw Star is a C'tarl-C'tarl, a race of gluttonous adrenaline-filled cat-people with insane invulnerability levels. Aisha can also transform into a huge white tiger when she's at full power.
In Ranma ˝, Shampoo, who is already cursed to turn into a small pink cat by Jusenkyo, runs into the Maomolin —a giant ghost cat who fancies her as a bride. He'll turn her permanently into a cat if the New Year's Bell rings 108 times. As the ritual proceeds, she grows cat ears and a tail.
Rosario + Vampire's homeroom teacher, Nekonome-sensei is the homeroom teacher of a school filled with monsters, where they learn to disguise themselves and hide their species. She can't hide her cat ears or tail, and professes a love of raw fish. Also fanservice-heavy, but everyone is Ms. Fanservice in that show.
To be more specific, her ears can at least be written off as part of her hair as long as they don't stand out too much, but in both the anime and manga she has a LOT of trouble hiding her tail, to the point of Running Gag.
Loki/Leo from Fairy Tail is another male example, though he only has the ears, which are themselves barely noticeable.
In the Studio Ghibli film, The Cat Returns, the main character, an insecure high school-er named Haru, saves the prince of "Cat Kingdom", and is then asked to marry him. After being taken to said kingdom, she begins to take on characteristics of a cat, including ears, paws, whiskers, nose, and tail.
In one episode of FLCL, Naota's "horns" resemble kitty ears, which make him look like a catboy. The creator of the series mentioned in the commentary that he was tired of kitty ears being put on girls and wanted to give them to a boy for a change. After bumping heads with Ninamori, Naota's "ears" transfer to her very briefly before they get bigger. Turns out they weren't cat ears.
In Soul Eater, Blair is magical cat creature capable of taking humanoid form. In humanoid form, she takes on the appearance of a young tall sexy woman with a set of purple catlike ears. She also has a curled up purple cat tail that resembles her cat form one.
All of the main characters in Free Collars Kingdom are actual cats, but for the most part they appear as cat girls/boys.
Nekoko in Kannazuki no Miko is a cat girl who and also a Girl with Psycho Weapon, as she attacks with a giant syringe, representing the fact that she was a subject of unethical medical testing as a child.
Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto. EVERY cat in the world is actually a catgirl or boy of appropriate size. Humans interacting with them treat them and view them as cats.
In Yu Gi Oh Zexal, Yuma's friend Cathy has no real physical cat-like features (she wears her hair in a way to make it resemble cat ears) but she does have a strange ability to communicate and control actual cats, something that has never been explained. Natually, as a duelist, her deck uses cat-themed monsters. (Her two known Xyz monsters, Twin-Tail Cat Lady an Cat Girl Magician, are bona-fide Cat Girls themselves.)
Ninin Ga Shinobuden has Shinobu dressing up as a cat girl for Kaede's school festival.
Axis Powers Hetalia has a strip dealing with a festival in memory for the cats killed because they were thought to be evil. This becomes an opportunity to show several characters with cat ears, male or female.
France also wears a pair of cat ears during the Christmas strips. He lampshades them when he's having what he thinks are his last thoughts after facing the wrong end of Switzerland's gun.
Japan is visiting Greece, who is always flanked by stray cats. Greece says that if there is an afterlife, he would want to be reborn as a cat. * plop* - Japan places cat ears on him.
Azusa, a.k.a. "Azu-nyan" from K-On! isn't really a catgirl, but she's often forced to wear cat ears by the music club advisor.
Hayate the Combat Butler finally delves into this turning Izumi into one through possession in chapters 274 and 275◊, including the inclusion of proving just how much of a Chaste Hero Hayate is.
Hayate is also forced into one early on, Allowing him to be raped by the tiger. Oh yeah, the head butler also tries a move. Hayate is on the absolute verge of tears. At least it's better than the sailor suit..oh wait...no it's not...
Elina from Queen's Blade is supposedly fully human, but wears tiger striped armor, a cat ears tiara, and wears armorer guantlets with cat claws. She is even shown to have tiny fangs when she lets her evil side out to play.
In Welcome to the NHK!, Sato gets a crush on a catgirl mage in an MMORPG. It turns out it's actually his male friend Yamazaki, who is doing it to prove a point. Misaki tries to break Sato of his crippling addiction to the MMORPG by dressing up as a catgirl herself—complete with meowing—but Sato's response is to throw things at her and tell her to go find a convention to cosplay at.
Dal Dal from Girls Of The Wild sports tiger-ear hair clips and an ever-present cat-smile.
Unsorted, Both and Other
Neconoclasm is a manga about catgirls with a nicely-sized online preview, and thus provides a very nice example.
Mahou Sensei Negima! includes both cat-eared costumes and real catgirls. Most costume examples are listed under Cat Eared Hood, however two characters strongly associated with cats are:
Koyomi, one of Fate's Ministrae, whose ears and tail are the genuine article. She even transforms into a were-cat-beast-thing during the second fight against Jack Rakan.
Chachamaru, a Kindhearted Cat Lover, has cat ears as part of her cat themed pactio outfit. Her artifact is also a Kitty Cat Kill Sat.
The "ears" of most life-size Persocoms in Chobits (actually used to contain interface jacks) may be deliberately designed to resemble Cat Girl ears.
Lushe from Bastard!! is often depicted with cat ears.
Shadow Panther, Misaki/Hikaru's first opponent in Angelic Layer.
So is Mao.
Parodied in Cromartie High School when resident butt monkey Akira Maeda has to become a cat for a week to prove that he can comprehend the relationship between animals and humans. After a week, he finally gives up, only for him to be congratulated on being an excellent cat.
Interesting example with the Dogs: Bullets & Carnage manga. There is a cat-girl... only she's at least seventy, and looks every year.
Lampshaded in Maria+Holic by the Dorm Leader. The characters discuss how her ears "aren't fake" and can "actually move", and at one point, the protagonist finds a cat-ear headband in the garden, leading them to speculate if the catgirl is actually real.
Haineko, the manifested spirit form of Rangiku Matsumoto's zanpakuto. Flirtatious, mischievous and a bit pervy, Haineko is basically a hornier Rangiku, and is often portrayed more in the light of a teenager even though she looks in between 21-28.
A manga titled Cat Hunt was done by a Yamamoto Kumoi. In it, a creepy guy envisions all the cats he sees as catgirls and catboys, and he describes by narration how he uses catnip to get close to some of them so they can play. Granted, some of them are friendly enough to approach him without need for catnip.
Utawarerumono had catgirls and boys among its cast.
In Keroro Gunso whenever Giroro's cat friend (called Ms. Furbottom in the English dub of the anime), usually a Nearly Normal Animal, uses Kululu's gun that turns animals into humans on herself, she transforms into two different forms: her manga human form has her appear with cat ears, while her anime human form gives her a tail.
Kansuke from Cat Paradise is a normal cat who can transform into a Catboy whenever he puts on one of his owner's goofy costumes. He retains his claws, ears, tail, some of his fur, and his snarky personality.
OEL Manga Reality Check! has Catreece, a hyper-intelligent housecat whose avatar on the virtual-reality Internet is a catgirl of the Genki Girl variety.
The Cat was once a costumed heroine who used a powered costume, but a ritual was performed on her, transforming her into the werecat Tigra. She went on to join The Avengers, eventually giving her old costume to Patsy Walker, who took the name Hellcat. There's a tug-of-war between her human and feline instincts and which has the upper hand tends to depend on the writer. One day she's able to fly interstellar spacecraft, the next she's chasing and eating mice and unable to speak (except in cat noises.)
Wonder Woman has faced four villains called Cheetah: Two pre-Crisis costumers and two Post Crisis catgirls. The first catgirl, Barbara Ann Minerva, is the current and best-known Cheetah and the basis for the animated version. (The other catgirl was her successor, and male. Barbara killed him.)
The X-Men has Emma Frost's early student, Catseye, who could turn into a cat. However, this was later retconned by creator Chris Claremont into her being a mutant cat who could turn into a human. However, this was re-retconned back into her being a human mutant by Marvel's editorial, who hated the idea (Stan Lee had done the same thing years earlier, when Chris Claremont had Wolverine originally hinted to be a mutant wolverine.)
Marvel has a catboy, the Inhuman Talon, from Marvel's Avengers spin-off Guardians of the Galaxy. Who's also a sorcerer, a Keet.
Male example: Tom, the son of the superhero Wildcat of DC Comics' JSA, is a catboy.
Jil DeSmoot in Nexus is a Felim, an alien species of cat-people. She's also a Lipstick Lesbian (in fact, one issue revealed that the males and females of her species have a deep instinctive aversion to each other except during mating season).
Pantha, of the Teen Titans, was a catgirl created by genetic alteration. She doesn't know if she was a human woman or a female panther prior to the alteration. She was a human woman as explained when her past was finally revealed. Though it was an alternate timeline so that may not be the case in the real timeline.
Catspaw, of the Legion Of Super-Heroes, was similar to Pantha, but was definitely a human before being altered by the Dominators.
Close to manga, but done in the USA... a series called Reality Check! by Studio Tavicat featured as a main protagonist Catreece. In the world of Virtual Reality, she's a cute bouncy cat girl (her sister's a bit more... well, catty). In the world of reality, she's a... cat.
3 Kittens: Purr-fect Weapons features a group of War On Terror superheroines that were too blatantly Fanservice to appear in Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose except in crossovers.
Blacksad does this with women in general, making them look more human than the men. It should be noted that the women only barely qualify, being somewhat closer to the Beast Man look in some ways, and the male cats do not qualify but are an example of Petting Zoo People.
Greer Grant Nelson originally used a custom in her identity as The Cat, The Cat was upgraded to Tigra, and the costume was given to Patsy Walker, who took the name Hellcat. Hellcat crops up now and then, sometimes as an actual catgirl due to the fact that she was once the wife of the Son of Satan.
Animated Teen Titans also gives Batman villain Killer Moth a daughter named Kitten who briefly took on an anime-like catgirl form and meowed when asked to clarify her name. Of course, given the show's love of sight gags, there's no being sure if this was seriously meant to be a superpower of hers. Animated Starfire was also turned into a cat briefly.
It's probably also worth mentioning that Tamaranians like Starfire are descended from tree-dwelling flying cats
The current White Tiger, Ava Ayala from Avengers Academy. Her costume is also much more cat like that her brother's costume(Her brother being the original White Tiger).
Fanfiction
Glorious Purr features a Loki who gained cat ears and a tail by falling through the void. (He also gained a cat-like mentality, which is the focus of the story.)
Somewhat subverted in the independent short Pat Gets A Cat - the protagonist imagines a human girl behaving like a cat, but without the ears, tail or most common traits of the garden-variety catgirl.
Kilgore Trout's Venus On The Half Shell (ghostwritten by Philip José Farmer instead of Kurt Vonnegut *
Farmer was mistaken for Vonnegut by critics, which pissed Vonnegut off no end.
) has a cat-like alien queen who makes love to the hero and grants him immortality.
Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind series has C'Mell. She, and any other Underpeople (animals modified into human form and intelligence) with "C" in front of their name, is cat derived. Typical of the trope, C'mell works as a "girlygirl" (sort of a geisha). Not so typical is that C'mell is specifically described as a very beautiful girl with no physical feline features. She is even more notable for being the first true catgirl (even the term is used to describe her), appearing in 1962.
However, the cover illustration◊ for the magazine that first had "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," did portray her with cat ears.
CJ Cherryh's Chanur series has catlike aliens — a powerful space-faring species where the female is dominant — who rescue and take care of Tully, a lost human male.
Greebo's human form in the Discworld books is very male, ruggedly handsome, and vaguely feline.
subverted in that the feline traits he shows are much more like a real cat than usual; at one point he drinks milk from a bowl and tries to curl up in a warm place, and he is persuaded into quite a strenuous nights' work on the promise of a kipper
he also shows talons and exceptional strength and balance when the occasion requires
subverted by his wearing a tabby cat mask to a masked ball, with quite alarming results
Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer has a Sexy Alien Catgirl from a Superior Species teach the hero about Sexy Catgirl Sex. It's notable that this is a Western novel from the 1960s.
Meena in the novel Brave Story (which later became a manga and a movie) is a cat girl. In the book, she's depicted as a Funny Animal, with fur all over and decidedly feline features; in the visual adaptions of the novel, though, she's portrayed as a cute nekomimi.
Richard Calder's Dead Boys, Dead Things, and Frenzetta feature semen-hungry cat-girls and the demigod-like men (later represented as wolf-men in the last book mentioned) who love to commit sexualised murder on them. This makes the "computer virus turning girls into gynoids" of his Dead Girls seem simple and pleasant by comparison....
In Neal Asher's Poliy Series, a popular body-modification subculture are those called catadapts, who have modified themselves into a feline appearance.
S. Andrew Swann's Moreau series (Forests of the Night, Emperors of the Twilight, Specters of the Dawn, and Fearful Symmetries) is set in a mid-21st century world where 'Moreaus' are animal-human hybrids created as soldiers via genetic engineering; the main character, Nohar Rajasthan, is the son of first-generation tiger hybrids bred for Indian special forces; there are other species that were engineered for special purposes, such as rats and mongoose.
The Black magician of Moon Over Soho creates these by merging people and actual cats to cater to sex club clients. Since this is a Verse that falls hard down the Cynical Side of The Scale this is not pretty.
Kitten in Red Handed has mannerisms close to a cat, even though she is an alien.
The titular character in the Cat Kid series by Brian James is a girl who is half-kid, half-cat.
The Vegians of the Lensman universe lack the ears, but qualify in many other ways; specifically, they have tails and a lot of feline traits as biological and societal characteristics.
Gene Vincent's song "Catman", later covered by The Birthday Party. The titular character is, admittedly, as sexy a beast as Ray Winstone, but is scary as hell.
There are a few in the Yu-Gi-Oh!Trading Card Game — the two Nekogals and Thunder Nyan Nyan. The Thunder Nyan Nyan is depicted as a cat-girl playing drums.
"Catgirl" is a monster in the Munchkin spoof card game. The Munchkin catgirls are just as adorable as their anime counterparts, but also happen to be vicious cannibals who love to eat male adventurers. Most of the catgirl's attacks are standard Dungeons & Dragons attacks, with cutesy names-"Pounce" becomes "Pouncy-Poo", while "Rend" becomes "Rendy-Wendy".
And there's also the "Catboi hireling" in the same game. A cute tigerstriped male in a loincloth, usable only by female characters. But he's on the player's side, not a monster.
The Star Munchkin variant has them as a playable race, the D20 version states that they're the result of a Furry convention and an irresponsible bio-engineer conference getting double-booked.
Indeed SJ Games likes this trope. Several GURPS supplements feature the Felicia-series bioroids, a race of genetically engineered cat-girls. They can temporarily gain Super Speed but afterward their libido goes into overdrive.
Cat people are also one of the "chimeras" in GURPS Technomancer. They look something like the Cat-Nuns in Doctor Who. Cat halflings however, resemble conventional catgirls.
And if you find yourself angry with catgirls, you can always go ahead and Whack a Catgirl,
Shadowrun has catgirls/catboys thanks to a spike in the mana levels when Halley's Comet swung around, triggering what became known as Sudden Unexplained Recessive Genetic Expression, or SURGE. Only a small percentage of the SURGE-affected population became actual cat-people, though - the majority of people are more drastically affected.
Actually SURGE began with the Sixth World, when elves and dwarves first appeared. The Halley's Comet just caused a sudden and significant raise in magic level that triggered another wave of transformations (as it happened with orcs and trolls a few decades earlier) in humans. This time it was pretty random, and ranged from simple cosmetic changes, to serious cthulhu-esque monstrosities. These metahumans are known commonly as "changelings". You can find the catgirl stuff in the 'Runner's Companion'. Also, the SR level of cosmetic surgery allows easy and not-so-expensive modifications, so if you want to, you can be a catgirl.
Averted by Striper, who's likely to eat your face if you even think of her as this trope.
Dungeons & Dragons has the Weretouched (people who have a Were Beast in their family tree) may exhibit minor features of their were-whatever ancestors, like ears, eyes, or fangs, as can the shifters from Eberron, an entire race of feral human/lycanthrope hybrids.
Old World of Darkness players have a couple options for making catgirls (and boys): Gangrel from Vampire: The Masquerade whose animal features "happen" to be mostly feline, Bastet Were Cats, pooka from Changeling: The Dreaming with a cat affinity, and an entire kith of Cat Folk (traditional look and all) among the Eastern fae with the Neyan—whose name is even the Japanese version of "meow".
Those wanting to play catpeople in the New World of Darkness have other options: Changelings of the Beast seeming who have feline characteristics, cat Skinchangers, the Bastet Changing Breeds, and the werecats of the Colony.
The Lion Fey from Exalted. Basically Fair Folk with the Assumption of Bestial Visage Charm, who've decided to take leonine form.
Various Lunar Exalted also display catgirl traits, particularly Cult of the Illuminated Kid Sidekick Faithful Pia.
Being a catgirl is one of the potential Special Qualities a maid can have in Maid RPG — and they can also be were-tigers or were-lions. Female butlers can also have these Special Qualities. Player Character Masters or NPC Masters made with the Master creation rules only have access to the were-cat Special Quality (they don't get access to the portion of the Maid Special Qualities table the normal catgirl is on), but other NPC Masters can be whatever the GM feels like. Your catgirl can also actually be a spider, depending on what you roll and whether you're willing to go for it.
This is a 20pt template in Big Eyes, Small Mouth. Sample neko-jin have included a warrior from the Space Opera world of Cathedral and a portal-travelling wanderer looking for Bastet, as in the Egyptian goddess.
The Manhunter game has the Kirn race, who are cat-like humanoid aliens. The females are depicted as catgirls.
Theater
Cats costumes resemble this, though the characters they are playing actually fall under Nearly Normal Animal.
Toys
Yes, you read that right. A Japanese (naturally) invention, Neurowear are testing artificial, brain-wave controlled cat ears. Here is a demonstration video of the prototype.
And now they're real: Necomimi. For obvious reasons, they are very popular at Anime Cons.
Video Games
Atelier Iris also has Norn, a catgirl whose catlike behavior (but oddly enough, not her cat features) baffles people. Though one (female) NPC does becomes obsessed with touching her ears(!). It is eventually revealed that Norn is really a cat turned into human form by a witch. Whether this means a normal cat or a werecat isn't clear; a werecat NPC thinks she's one of them, though.)
Coyori from Battle Fantasia is a cat who was changed into a human by a good witch. She has the tail but not the ears.
Meď in Beyond Good And Evil is a blue-furred cat woman, and almost completely catlike in appearance. Except for, you know—the lack of tail, the blue lips, and huge, uh, assets.
Taokaka from BlazBlue comes from a race of cat-people who hide their real faces underneath hoods, giving them a decidedly Black Mage-like appearance. Aside from the obvious big claws and tail, she also possesses an insatiable appetite.
Supporting cast member Kokonoe is another catgirl, this time quite visibly modeled after the above-mentioned nekomata, having the trademark split tail, and some rather... interesting hobbies.
The Bloody Roar games have Uriko, who is halfway between Cat Girl and a Petting Zoo Person. Her head, face, and ears are catgirl like, however her limbs are more animal-like than standard cat girls.
Lin from Breath Of Fire V is also a catgirl, but never removes her ear-covering headgear in the game itself, though her tail is still quite evident - a rare case of Concept Art Dang It.
Shanoa from Castlevania Order Of Ecclesia can transform into a catgirl with a particular glyph. In addition to giving her a new set of attacks, it also allows her to talk to the various cats that she rescues.
"You Show Me Yours and I'll Show You Mine" was the title of a thread on the City of Heroes message boards. The topic? Catgirl characters. Just about everyone has one, it seems, and with the versatility of the game's costume editor, they go from ears-and-tail to scary-feral. Some people have several. Especially male players. Or so the joke goes. The canon Cat Girl is Mynx, though, who glib speedster Synapse apparently found rooting through garbage one day, or some such. She cleans up pretty good, to her credit.
Yoriko in Da Capo, a more or less hidden character unlocked after the five main routes. She's actually a rich girl that fell in love with Junichi by watching him go to school in the form of her cat. Only shapeshifted to look mostly like her. When asked what possible function cat ears could serve, Junichi accidently blurts out that they're cute, right? Presumably to avoid fridge logic of bestiality, the romance between them doesn't get intimate until after she turns back into a cat and her real body starts going to his school.
Xiao from the first Dark Cloud game is an interesting case. She starts out as a regular stray cat found in one of the game's dungeons, and an item used to advance later on turns her into a human, and also the first ally in your party. In Dark Chronicle, a cat-girl costume can be acquired for the female main character
Most famous video game example: Felicia from Darkstalkers.
Beastmasters in Disgaea 2 combine standard demonic ears with not quite as standard lion tails and "mane-like" hair for the appearance of almost-but-not-quite lion girls. The "Kit Cat*
Now called "Nekomata" as of Disgaea 4
" breed of monsters are so obvious they didn't even get mentioned, with kitty ears, tail, and strategically-placed strips of fur, Felicia-style.
Not to mention the Thieves in Disgaea 2, who had cat eyes and wore a hood that resembled cat ears.
Disgaea 3 and 4 take this even further: Not only do they have the previously-mentioned Nekomata, thieves and Beastmasters, but they also have Catsabers, a type of monster that looks like a little kid wearing a cat costume.
Disgaea 2 Dark Hero Days has Death Sabers which are more demonic looking varation. They appear in Disgaea 4 as DLC.
Yayoi, the geisha who guards the entrance to Dark Demon's lair in Dynamite Headdy. When you deal enough damage to her, she gets pissed off and becomes much more fast and aggressive. They replaced her with a boring robot in the US version. Diss!
Additional video game example: The Mithra from Final Fantasy XI are an entire race of catgirls.
There are male mithra, but they don't go out adventuring. They're rare and are needed for breeding, so they don't get to leave the villages.
Final Fantasy XIV has their own version of the FFXI races, including their own version of mithra named miqo'te. They come in two varieties: Regular and Drow. And the males are every bit as scarce.
There are plans to add playable Male miqo'te. So we'll finally have catboys in addition to catgirls.
Adelle from Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 has many traits of a cat, she even got her nickname Adelle the Cat. Her bow looks like cat ears and she has a belt hanging from her waist that looks like a tail, but she's 100% human (er, hume)
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles:Echoes Of Time has Sherlotta, who has a cat tail and a big orange bow that resembles cat ears. And she turns into a cat, too! Though near the end, the Sherlotta the main character knew turns out to be a spirit of a human put into a cat.
In Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time Leona, one of the party members and potential romance options, has the ears and tail of a cat.
In Hatsune Miku Project Diva 2nd, one of KAITO's wardrobe name is "Neko Cyber" (Cyber Neko), which is.
In Hellsinkerthere is have the human form of Lost Property 771.
Then there is also Millionlives and Ninelives in the Shrine of Farewell.
La Hire and Bartolomeo in Jeanne d'Arc are axe-wielding lion and panther men, respectively.
Mawra and Blaze, two thirds of the Therion Quirky Miniboss Squad, are an anthropomorphic lynx and white tiger, as well.
Len in Kagetsu Tohya is an advanced familiar/succubus made half dead cat and half little dead girl soul, which makes her alive again. Normally, she's either a cat or girl, but this seems to be merely a matter of preference as she can be seen with cat ears when surprised and also tends to act quite like a cat even when in the form of a girl.
Also Arcueid, from the same series, who isn't a cat girl but occasionally grows cat ears in the same fashion as Hikaru from Magic Knight Rayearth. There's also a super-deformed version, Neco-Arc. Even villain Nrvnqsr Chaos gets a super-deformed cat version of himself, Neco Arc Chaos, in the later Melty Blood games.
The Lunar RPG series features "beastmen" as a race. They have pointed ears, Cute Little Fangs and a lot of hair. Curiously, they intermingle freely with humans rather than living separately. Some of the playable characters were Beastmen.
Cham Cham out of Samurai Shodown 2 is quite a catgirl. Ears, tail, claws, and fleas. Seriously, she acts more feline than not—when she's unarmed, she walks on all fours (not crawl, but catlike), whenever she relaxes she sits on her haunches, and some of her poses (including a taunt) have her scratching behind an ear with her hindleg..er, foot.
Ati in the visual novel Sekien No Inganock, who sports the standard (if somewhat ragged) ears and tail, along with some massive claws and a golden, slitted right eye. (Her left is still a normal blue.) Her personality can be rather cat-like at times.
Her Expy in the PSP game New Traveler, Yuno, goes one step further by being half-kitkin, making her appear more like the traditional catgirl.
Kurt, from Shadow Caster, morphs into a feline as his first alternate form, with all the stat and power boosts one would expect.
Nekomata are a recurring demon/Persona/whatever in the Shin Megami Tensei series.
Tira, from Soul Calibur was originally designed as a catgirl, but the idea was scrapped because she was associated with ravens. The mantle was passed onto Talim, who donned a cat-themed look for her second player costume in SC IV.
Star Ocean has an entire race of people (Fellpool, denizens of planet Roak) with cat tails and elf ears. Fellpool don't act catlike at all, but Lesser Fellpool have the cat ears too and are apparently more beastlike — the one that may join your party in the first game can change back and forth from cat to catgirl, and uses cat-themed martial arts moves.
Star Ocean The Second Story has Leon Geeste — A "Fellpool" with cat ears (we never see a tail, but it might be under his coat) inexplicably on planet Expel (Expellians look like normal humans). No one in the game comments on this. He doesn't act cat-like, though, save for an odd instance where he purred after reluctantly letting his ears be scratched (Which he was ashamed of).
The in game dictionary in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time explains Leon's presence. Expellians are actually a hybrid race descended from both humans and fellpool that were native to Expel. Leon is a genetic throwback that only appears when both parents have the same recessive gene on the twelfth chromosome.
In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, Meracle joins your party, and she is a by-the-books catgirl who can also turn into a normal-sized cat. She thinks she might be originally from Roak (she's not sure of her origins, due to being [accidentally] kidnapped by a Mad Scientist at a young age) Also, it's ... unclear what the scientists were doing to her in the first place, given what they made her wear◊ (note the collar).
Tia from Stella Deus
Cammy from Street Fighter has a full body catsuit complete with ears and tail as a downloadable alternate outfit for Super Street Fighter IV.
Suikoden IV's Noah deliberately invokes this trope. She's got kitty ears and oversized cat paws... which are most likely just a headband and gloves, though she insists she's actually a Nay-Kobold. She's a con girl and loves weaving sob stories, trying to weedle sympathy and material goods out of any suckers who actually fall for her tall tales.
Suikoden Tierkreis features actual beast people (including many females of the feline persuasion) in a tribe known as the Furious Roar. The race is basically fur covered humans with burly frames (including the females) and beast-like heads.. Several◊ of them◊ join your group, along with the chief of the tribe who is a canine (more wolf like◊) rather than a feline (as his rulership rival◊ is).
Alicia Priss and her sisters Flare and Stare Priss are the main antagonists from Tail Concerto, an underrated PS1 3D game. You can see the game intro here
Is worth to mention that Alicia, leader of the dreaded Black Cat Gang is secretly in love with Waffle, the game protagonist... who happens to be a dog.
KOS-MOS from Xenosaga, a Robot Girl, gained headgear that resembled cat ears after a plot-important upgrade in Episode III. In a comical side story she also got infected with a computer virus that makes her meow randomly at the end of her sentences to boot: this is carried over into her second Endless Frontier appearance.
She does it in Endless Frontier 1 too. "Boost, nya"
In Yume Nikki the heroine can turn into a Cat Girl by using one of the effects.
Visual Novels
Rika Furude from Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni is often compared to a kitten in the narration, and her punishment games usually involve making her wear cat accessories. There is also her verbal tic "Mii~", which is meant to be the sound of a kitten meowing.
Bernkastel keeps the theme in Umineko No Naku Koro Ni and has a cat tail, as well as cute little cat minions that will tear you to pieces on her command. In Episode 8 it's also revealed that her real world manifestation is Ikuko Hachijō's pet cat Bern.
Caribbean Blue on katbox.net has several main character that are this trope or will assume from time to time, depending how the story goes, also as part of a series of plot points this trope is believed to identify the island's guardian
El Goonish Shive features a tough cat man: Elliot himself, during the Sister arc, who turns into a were-cat to return to Moperville.
Myan from Cat Nine when she's transformed. She's supposed to be fully human when using her collar, but the spell that allows her to transform was incomplete, but they decided to leave like that anyway.
Exterminatus Now has anthropomorphic characters, including one cat-boy. Drawn in Sonic-style artwork (the story however is not for children), the characters are humanoid animals, not just humans with animal ears and tails, as they all belong to the same race. However, they identify their species as "fox" or "penguin" or even "zebra" according to their appearance.
Mzzkiti from Freighter Tails and Cross Time Cafe.
The cast of Purgatory Tower is entirely made up of (non-cute, non-Anime-style) animal/humanoid hybrids or anthropomorphics (and in one case, a plant/animal/human hybrid), as the world the webcomic plays in is peopled by socalled "marsuls", humanoids fused with animals and displaying animal traits, down to their psyche. Features a cat-woman, a hyena-woman, a squirrel-girl, a racoon-man and others.
The all-but-defunct Under Power has a catgirl character who is adorable, sweet, domestically submissive, with a high libido... and who also happens to be a nigh-invincible cyborg who kills her "boyfriend" every time she sleeps with him. Lucky, he seems to be powered by FPSs, and can respawn every time he's killed.
Repeatedly respawning just to die again seconds later can be more of a curse than a blessing, especially when he pisses off the Elf.
The jury's still out on whether or not Gina from Outside Interference is a cat. Although she has cat-like ears and features, she lacks any visible tail, in a setting where all the other Anthro characters have them.
Something Positive doesn't have any actual catgirls, but frequently has gags involving catgirl cosplayers, which are depicted as grotesque muppet-like creatures which swarm through fan conventions annoying everyone else.
Anya from Experimental Comic Kotone. In a case of questionable biology, her sister Lisa is a fox-girl.
Yosh! has two of the main characters (Kate and Blue) changed into catgirls by the Applied Phlebotinum of the comic's world.
Jayeden and Crusader's character Kat is a catgirl and appears with no warning and apparently no reason in the middle of the comic with a very rushed (2 line!) introduction.
Kathleen "Kat" Vance of Sequential Art. And her good friend Vanity Thorn (Her real name... poor girl).
Flaky Pastry has Marelle as a lead character, who hates being called a Catgirl. Quite where she fits into the trope is quite a good question since she is basically human, wears clothes and has no tail, but DOES have real cat-style ears, a somewhat flattened nose and a dark skin colour which is presumably skin, although this isn't made clear. She certainly has a mop of off-white hair styled in human fashion.
Myshka from Not Quite Daily Comic, a regular cat who was accidentally transformed into a "dangerously furry" Cat Girl, retains most of her former behavior, somewhat subverting the trope.
Linburger calls them Mirrakae. They have little trouble finding one night stands as they seem to be fetishized in universe. Long term relationships are trickier, especially for homosexuals. They're a Dying Race for whatever reason, so they shun homosexuals of their kind, since they need as many breeders as possible.
Liger Neqishol (do NOT call her Nekishojo) of Triquetra Cats (the main characters fall under the costume only definition)
Teeko from Chirault. The cat-person species is known as Kyrions, and they're considered a type of demon.
Yuri from Spacetrawler starts off wearing a pair of costume cat ears all the time. Then she gets a pair of real cat ears surgically grafted onto her head.
Fiyora Nya has Ayako, Sierra, and catboys Ryuuko and Ichirou.
Katt o' Nine Tails in Spinnerette, a French Canadian superheroine who, from what little we've heard so far, gained her powers from a magical cat. Unusually for this character type, Katt has (as her name suggests) no less than nine fully prehensile tails. She's also apparently a fantastic masseuse.
Aryssa Katrina of Nick Meyer's Verboten is a cat girl in the classical mold. This is because she's part feralian — a species of humanoid felines with a tribal, Proud Warrior Race Guy society. Since she's only half feralian, she's a cute Petting Zoo Person, but she lacks the agility and strength of full feralians, and she's not too popular with her tribe.
Tiren from "Dubious Company" is a catgirl ninja. Her mother is a ninja and her father is a "beastman" so she's also a Half-Human Hybrid .
Zokusho Comics: Asuka, the CEO of Kodate Corporation is a catgirl. She's somewhat unusual in that so far she hasn't shown any of the traditional traits of a cat girl. She seems to be a very astute business woman who happens to have cat ears.
Siat Wildstar of erotic fantasy webcomic Eromugen.
Wayward Sons: Nemean hybrids like H'pitand S'ket are catgirls. Pure Nemeans like B'st are much furrier.
Sinfest had the ditzy Devil Girl fan-nicknamed Tangerine who wears a catgirl-y hoodie and... Changey!
Faith, from Alone In A Crowd. In her case, it's described as a "birth defect", one which her parents refused to have "fixed" because they loved her just as she is before they died. Although Faith is bullied at school because of them, her ears do have at least one benefit - cat-like hearing.
The girl is one, and the boy seems to be some sort of canine.
Miyet, just to name one from the Whateley Universe. (Double catgirl quotient because the actual goddess Bast — see Mythology — is behind her transformation and talks to her in her head every so often.)
"Kittymorphs" are one of the first alternate player character races you can unlock in Improbable Island.
In The Official Fanfiction University of Redwall, an Otaku signed up as a Cat Girl.
Fauna of DC Nation defaults to a felinoid form during a battle. A cat is simply, pound for pound, one of the most effective land predators on the planet, making it a rather useful fallback for a fight.
Another deviantART creation is Ken D. Blackwell's Pagan, a cryptid cat girl who wanders the world getting into all kinds of adventures because of her curiosity.
MSF High Forum: Michelle is this crossed with Legion, Jess and Mira however are full Cat Girls though. Justin Mclish on the other hand is a cat boy/
Don't forget Neko, the nine-year-old kitten-girl. Pure evil, in much the same sense as GIR.
This seems to be what the "alien" Talinth are in Pariah.
Suzi, Kai, and Maliko in Tales of MU, the 'companions' of the overbearing foxgirl Sooni. These 'nekoyokai' (or just 'nekos') are rather more cat-like than most cat girls, having all-over fur and cat-like eyes, unlike the rather more human-like Sooni.
Actually, if you do think about it, you might consider that she has some knowledge of genetics and gene splicing, which might also explain the pack of attack kittens she sometimes has with her.
Clover in Totally Spies! became a catgirl in the episode "Wild Style" after being injected with a serum.
Manny Rivera from Nickelodeon cartoon El Tigre has a superpowered alterego which is a catboy called El Tigre — he can turn into this form by spinning his mystical belt buckle. In fact, it seems every male in the Rivera side of the family consists of cat-themed supers, be they hero or villain.
Angel in the underrated early-80's animated film Rock and Rule is clearly a biological cat-woman.
Variation: in Code Lyoko, Odd Della Robia's virtual form on Lyoko is a Cat Boy, albeit one with non-retractable claws and the ability to fire "laser arrows" from his forearms.
Cat Man is a hench of Big Bad Coiffio in Perfect Hair Forever, a 6-episode anime parody, who appears to be a surly man in a cat costume. He hates shounen like Gerald with a passion and will fire indiscriminately at them with a gatling gun if they bother him. He lives in a giant cat-carrier — his floor is a sea of cat litter — he frequently grooms in public, and loves batting around stuffed-mice-on-strings.
Adam West in The Fairly Oddparents is known as Catman (a nod to the 1960's Batman) who is a crimefighter who is part man part cat.
Parodied in the Stroker and Hoop episode "XXX Wife (a.k.a. Stroke Her and Boob)"; when the pornographers attempt to splice feline DNA into two ditzy co-eds to cash in on the Furry market, they wind up with insane mutant catgirls that eat human flesh.
Tangath Toborn seems to have performed a Heroic Sacrifice. However with the current season's trips through time, the possibilities for new cat characters are there.
The Special Dream Match episode of Transformers Energon featured actual (robot) cat girls as the announcers for the matches. One appeared to favor Megatron while the other fancied Optimus Prime. Sixshot also appears to be somewhat of a catgirl fanboy, as in another episode he's seen reading a manga with pictures of catgirls in it. Since Sixshot was either controlling or hacking the Special Dream Match's fighter simulation, these two facts are actually connected.
An episode from Batman The Animated Series had Selena Kyle, aka Catwoman, kidnapped by a Dr. Moreau wannabe who turned her into...you get the picture. It should also be noted that the episode also had a cat-man (man-cat?) who liked how he was and wanted Selena to stay. At the end of the episode, he gives her the cure, but doesn't take it himself.
Another episode, The Demon Within, had Klarion the Witch Boy's cat, Teekl, transform into a cat girl to fight Batman and Etrigan. She also has this ability in the comics.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "Across the Universe" (which featured characters from Peter Laird and Jim Lawson's graphic novel series Planet Racers) had a white-skinned (furred?) woman with green hair and cat ears. No tail, though. Also, the Neko clan and Ame Tomoe from the Usagi Yojimbo-derived episode.
The original 80's TMNT had an ep where April was turned into a catgirl due to one of Shredder's experiments. She tried to eat Splinter. A true case of terror for someone like him who was already afraid of cats.
Mummies Alive! has Bastet, Nefertina's patron goddess, who turns Nefertina herself into a cat girl.
The titular characters of Josie and the Pussycats are examples of costume wearing cat girls.
Julie in Motorcity's standard getup isn't this, but her Animal Motif avatar has cat ears (and eyes like a Maneki Neko) and her car is named "Nine Lives."
(seriously) has a decent, but still incomplete list.
Biological Unusual Ears
