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Four reasons why Hello Kitty is actually a cat

Without a doubt this morning’s social media igniting news was that Sanrio, the company who created the wildly popular character Hello Kitty, has told the world that the character is not actually a cat.

The shocking revelation comes from an interview that the LA Times conducted with University of Hawaii based anthropologist Christine R Yano who is the curator for the Japanese American National Museum’s retrospective on of the world’s most famous, now non-feline, denizens.

“I was corrected — very firmly,” she says. “That’s one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”

Well to say that it blew the minds of the htxt.africa staff (as well as everyone on the internet) would actually be putting it rather mildly, in fact we were so disinclined to believe the statement that we found our four favourite reasons why Hello Kitty is actually a cat.

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Hello Kitty, Hello Art! – Christian Lau on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

1. Her name is Kitty

In fact her full name is Kitty White and she is the daughter of George and Mary White. We thought that her first name was in fact ‘Hello’, but for the sake of the article we won’t argue the point but rather use it in defence of the fact that she is in fact a kitty herself.

Hello Kitty - Jetske on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Hello Kitty – Jetske on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

2. She looks like a cat

She has pointy ears and whiskers which are characteristics inherent in almost all cats in fact her mother and father, both of her grandparents and her twin sister Mimmy all have the same pointy ears and whiskers leading us to believe that she was not somehow adopted into a family of cats and is in fact a cat herself.

Hello KItty for President 2012 - Christian Lau on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Hello KItty for President 2012 – Christian Lau on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

3 The Hello Kitty Wikia says so

Hello Kitty is described in the Hello Kitty Wikia thusly: “She is portrayed as a female white Japanese Bobtail Cat with a red bow.” If the most ardent, crazed fans in the world describe her as being a cat, then she is in fact a cat in much the same way that GIF is not pronounced “jif” because Death of the Author #ThatIsAll.

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4. She’s a F$%^ING cat

Listen here, if it looks like a cat, walks like a cat and talks like a cat then it must in fact be a cat according to the duck test. Well, actually the problem is that she satisfies only the first of the three criteria which makes it almost plausible that a bipedal creature with humans providing her voice in movies could in fact be a human.

In my experience – having studied the language for more than two years now – that the problem most probably lies in the translation from Japanese to English in which Sanrio were attempting to say that Hello Kitty was in fact not a cat, like her pet cat Charmmy Kitty is, but rather that she is in fact a little girl in a fantasy world of anthropomorphic cats.

Thankfully we can at least confirm that one fictional animal has remained true to his roots and is not claiming to be something other than a dog. Our collective childhood is secure once more.

We can confirm, Snoopy IS a dog.

[Main Image – Sanrio & Shutterstock]

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