A white and light brown cat wearing an elephant hat with pink inner lining stands outdoors, surrounded by greenery under bright daylight. 13:05
AaronsAnimals channel icon AaronsAnimalsOriginal creator 231M views Save

Mice take in the kitten nobody wanted

Every other kitten at the adoption stand gets picked up and carried home. Phil is the one nobody picks, and that's only the start of his bad luck. more

Phil is played by Prince Michael, the real cat behind the AaronsAnimals channel, and the magic around him is the work of his person, Aaron Benitez, a visual effects artist. Phil does his best at the stand. "Hi, me ready to be picked!" he says, and the answer he gets is "Hard pass."

A fluffy white cat sits inside a bright orange bag with black straps, mouth slightly open. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Phil is the only kitten nobody takes home.

He doesn't stay put for long, hopping from box to box until he lands in one that belongs to a magician, with a bunch of balloons tied to the top. The string slips, and Phil and his box lift off into the sky, drifting through a few tourists' photos on the way up. Then a bird pokes a balloon. Down he goes into a river, gets bumped by a boat and tumbles over a waterfall before the box washes up on shore.

Two mice out looking for food spot the box and hope it is a cheese delivery. Out pops a cat instead, and they're ready to run until Phil says hi and one of them wonders why he's all alone. "Come on, little one, we're going home." They feed him and scrub the river off him in a tub of foam, and when he wakes from a long sleep his new mom has breakfast ready.

A small rodent wearing glasses holds a toothbrush beside a fluffy white cat sitting in a white tub full of foam. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
His new family washes the river off him in a tub of foam.

For a while he's a mouse. When a person chases the family off a food run, he runs home with the rest of them, and he wears his own pair of mouse ears. The trouble is the mouse hole. They all slip through and he cannot, and Phil says he is "totally fine and not sad at all."

His mom throws him a birthday party to cheer him up, and then he reads the banner. One of the mice has written "fake son" across it as a prank. Phil walks out the door, and on his own he gets so lonely that he decides, "Maybe this glass can be my family."

He ends up at a golf course, where the caretaker takes him in. There's already a cat on staff, and the two of them split the daily chores. Phil is so keen on his new boss that he once slips and calls him "dad," and when he wants to do something big for him, the job he is handed is clearing the mice off the course.

When he breaks into their home, he finds his own family. They have kept missing posters of him all this time, and his father still holds onto Phil's old mouse ears. "Is that my sweet boy?" his mom asks, and Phil can only manage, "Mom? You... looked for me?" So instead of doing his job, he packs the whole family into a box, ties on balloons and sends them up and away from the course.

A white and light brown cat wearing an elephant hat with pink inner lining stands outdoors, surrounded by greenery under bright daylight. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Every other kitten at the adoption stand gets picked up and carried home.

They're on their way up when the other cat takes aim at the balloon string, and the box drops into the lake. Phil is sure he has lost both of his families. He hops a truck bound for California, and his only plan is "anywhere but here." What he never sees is the mice hanging from the loose balloons, floating off safe, shouting his name and promising they will find him.

That's a lot of heartbreak for one small cat, and plenty of people admit it made them cry. Many of them want a part two in which Phil hears those mice and finds his way home.

#kittens#adoption#animalrescue