Yay! Sanrio confirms Hello Kitty is indeed a cat
Reality check: No part of the famed Hello Kitty character displays a British school girl's physical features.
That matters, because earlier today, Hello Kitty fandom was thrown into chaos after one quote led to questions about whether Kitty is human or cat.
An LA Times report surfaced earlier claiming that Sanrio, the Japanese company responsible for Hello Kitty, said she "was a British schoolgirl."
Totally false. In fact, Sanrio has clarified to the website Kotaku that "Hello Kitty is a feline—just an anthropomorphic one".
Basically, she's a cat with human characteristics. You know, just like Walt Disney's Minnie, Daisy, Clarabelle Cow and every other animal chick in the cartoon world.
Sanrio's Hello Kitty portrait created in 1974. PHOTO: Sanrio
The report that started all this chaos was about an exhibition, Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty, the world’s first large-scale Hello Kitty museum retrospective.
It quoted Christine R Yano, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii who spent years studying the Hello Kitty phenomenon and also responsible for preparing a written text for the Los Angeles exhibit, saying:
But as a spokesperson from Sanrio's Tokyo headquarters explained to Kotaku: "Hello Kitty was done in the motif of a cat. It's going too far to say that Hello Kitty is not a cat. Hello Kitty is a personification of a cat."
Bottom line, Hello Kitty is indeed a cat with human characteristics. Are we clear now?
Sources: Kotaku, LA Times and JANM website
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