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Portland’s Trail of Coraline Cats
A temporary collection of 31 painted cat statues
I live in downtown Portland. My first year here, I felt like I was in Gotham City. I was repeatedly warned to never walk alone at night. My sibling’s car — with nothing visible inside — got broken into after only two nights.
This year, it just feels… empty. Other neighborhoods of Portland are much more interesting and populated.
No wonder the city of Portland teamed up with nearby film studio LAIKA to promote both downtown tourism and the 15th anniversary of the studio’s most popular film, Coraline.
For ten weeks, brightly painted cats in the style of Cat from the 2009 stop-motion film could be found, mostly clumped together in or near downtown. A few others were scattered in other areas, such as those by Pittock Mansion and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. For someone still pretty new to Portland, I appreciated the extra encouragement to go explore parts of the city I hadn’t yet seen.
The hired artists all took different artistic approaches. This statue was clearly sponsored and inspired by The Oregonian, sourcing different articles (e.g. “Choosing a Wife”) to make a hodgepodge collage:
