After it was completed in 1999, Shinkai made his own copies of "She and Her Cat" on CD-R and sold around 5,000 copies at Comiket and by mail through his website. It received critical acclaim, and won the grand prize at the 2000 DoGA CG Animation Contest. "Anime" authors Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc called it "simple, underplayed and just a little maudlin". Chris Beveridge of Mania.com watched the three versions and said "each looks gorgeous and the story for it is simply hauntingly beautiful". In a 2017 retrospective, Anne Lauenroth of Anime News Network ranked it Shinkai's ninth best work (out of 11), praising its use of lighting that gives "a modest beauty" to the scenery and its "carefully placed details" that transmits the wholeness of a world only partially presented.