And in today’s completely bizarre/almost unbelievable news: Sanrio has revealed that it’s most famous character, Hello Kitty, is not a cat. It’s a person. A girl. Yes, the cat-shaped character is a human. What the freakin’ eff?
The earth-shattering revelation has come to light because there’s a Hello Kitty retrospective opening at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles this year, and Hello Kitty expert/Harvard professor Christine R Yano has been speaking about how the character has become a cultural phenomenon. She's also thrown us for a loop in the process.
Professor Yano released a book last year called Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek Across the Pacific, and due to her level of expertise on all things HK, she was asked to submit written texts for the upcoming exhibition in LA.
‘I was corrected – very firmly,’ she tells the LA Times. ‘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.’ Mind you, although both Kitty and Charmmy look similar, Charmmy actually acts like a cat and not a person.
This is legit insanity. Kitty has a cat head. Not a girl head. In any case, her full name is Kitty White and she lives in London. Yes, London. She has a twin sister called Mimmy. Their parents are called George and Mary, and Kitty just loves her mum’s apple pie. Speaking of apples, her height is listed at ‘around five apples high’ and she weighs around three apples. She’s a very, very tiny girl, then.
Here’s another shocking piece of information: even though 90% of the Hello Kitty merchandise you see is pink, her favourite colour is actually red.
And have you ever noticed that she doesn’t have a mouth? That’s so that people can ‘project their own feelings onto her face’ says official HK designer Yuko Yamaguchi: ‘It's so that people who look at her can project their own feelings onto her face, because she has an expressionless face. Kitty looks happy when people are happy. She looks sad when they are sad. For this psychological reason, we thought she shouldn't be tied to any emotion – and that's why she doesn't have a mouth.’
The retrospective is opening in mid-October and on October 30 will see the first ever Hello Kitty Con, which will also take place in Los Angeles at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Little Tokyo.
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.