Entertainment

Lil Bub makes it big

She’s a strange beauty. Her green eyes are huge and better-suited to a creature twice her size. Her lower jaw is underdeveloped and toothless. Her tongue constantly hangs out of her mouth, making her appear like she’s in a constant trance.

She’s Lil Bub the cat, and according to her owner, Mike Bridavsky, her face is “ridiculously quizzical and adorable.”

Hundreds of thousands would seem to agree. In late 2011, Bridavsky launched a blog featuring his oddly appealing pet. Adorable images from the blog soon went viral, launching the kitty to Internet stardom.

Lil Bub may weigh just 4 pounds and still be a couple of months shy of her second birthday, but she has more than 100,000 Facebook friends. Her YouTube videos, where she usually does nothing more than crawl across grass and look around, regularly get more than a quarter of a million views. She has her own line of merchandise and has appeared on “Good Morning America.”

And now her star is growing brighter. Lil Bub is the subject of a documentary, “Lil Bub and Friendz,” now playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. In September, the famous feline will release a book, “Lil Bub’s Little Book: The Extraordinary Life of the Most Amazing Cat on the Planet.” Earlier this week, she did a photo shoot with Terry Richardson for Vice magazine, which is also behind the doc.

“Her unique look is certainly a big part of [her appeal],” says Bridavsky, a sound engineer and native of Bloomington, Indiana. “But it’s also her optimism . . . that inspires people. She shows that being different is great, that you can overcome disabilities.”

Like any intriguing personality, Lil Bub has a tragic back story. The runt of a feral litter, she was born with a veritable laundry list of birth defects, including dwarfism and polydactylism; her legs are short and stumpy, and she has an extra toe on each paw. When Bridavsky first adopted her, he took her to the vet, and the doc said she was the “weirdest cat he’d ever seen.” He expected she’d die in a few months.

“She wasn’t supposed to live, so people appreciate her strength,” posits Juliette Eisner, one of the documentary’s filmmakers. “Bub’s fans constantly send her messages saying how her videos and photos brighten their day and have gotten them through hard times.”

Summer Burton, an editor at Buzzfeed, the meme-centric Web site, agrees. “Everyone loves an underdog, especially one with a happy ending.”

But, it’s not just her sad early life that makes Bub so intriguing. Bridavsky thinks of her like an alien creature, and talks about Bub as having landed on Earth from another planet, a sort of feline E.T.

“You really have to meet her in person to understand that she is completely unlike other cats,” he boasts. “She isn’t skittish, she doesn’t panic, she doesn’t get aggressive . . . she is completely calm and full of wonder.”

But the various medical conditions that make Lil Bub so adorable may also be the cat’s eventual downfall. She’s healthy now, but her mobility is limited due to a rare bone disease called osteopetrosis. She takes medication to manage it, but it causes her bones to continue to grow and get more deformed as she ages. “There really isn’t much I can do besides gauge her comfort and quality of life as she grows older,” Bridavsky concedes.

Her filmmaker-fans believe the tiny creature — and her online popularity — have many good years ahead.

“Bub will always live on,” enthuses Eisner.

Her co-director, Andy Capper, agrees. “I think Bub will live forever, in my life, at least,” he says.