You have probably heard that the moneymaking machine called ‘Hello Kitty’ is not a cat as many people had believed but in fact a little girl five apples tall and weighing three apples. A teeny, tiny human. But the truth is – for me – that Hello Kitty is somewhere between cat and human. And what she truly is, is in the imagination and minds of millions of kids. The revelation that this imaginary girl is five apples tall confirms that assessment for me.
This is a feline/human, imaginary creature. A cartoon character. A character dreamt up by an employee of Sanrio called Yuko Shimizu in 1974. Hello Kitty was always an anthropomorphised cat based upon a white kitten given to her creator.
Hello Kitty is a girl living in London who is five apples tall and who weighs three apples by Michael BroadBut being an anthropomorphised cat, this was still a cat in the eyes of probably billions of people. But now we’ve been told that Hello Kitty is actually a girl, a person albeit miniscule and therefore not a real person (obvious). She is actually a little girl born and raised in the suburbs of London with a sister and a cat as a companion!
And so, after 50 years, Hello Kitty has transmogrified from being an anthropomorphised kitten to a human being. But I would suggest that this cartoon character is somewhere between the two and the creator should rely on purchasers of Hello Kitty merchandise to use their own imagination to decide what Hello Kitty actually is. It doesn’t matter really. The identity of this “creature” is in the minds of purchasers of Hello Kitty merchandise.
And I refer to merchandise because her creation has generated for Sanrio, the company that owns the rights to this creature, $80 billion to date.
Yuko Shimizu explained to the BBC that the inspiration for the character came from her childhood. She said that: “When I was a child, I got a small white kitten from my father for a birthday present.”
Research project unearthed the truth
The truth about Hello Kitty being a human being rather than a cat came about because of research being carried out by Christine R. Yano, a scholar. Hello Kitty is a cultural phenomenon and she was researching this. While curating a retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, she sent her notes for her research to Sanrio for their input. They were pleased with it but they corrected one major and critical detail: that Hello Kitty was in fact a girl.
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She was corrected firmly she said an added in a conversation with Los Angeles 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.”
The full name of Hello Kitty is “Kitty White”. Her astrological sign is Scorpio and she likes Apple pie. She is in the third grade at school and lives outside of London. Of course that’s all fictional and I’m back to my original point that you can believe what you want about Hello Kitty.
The phenomenon that is Hello Kitty is a creature which lives in the minds of kids. But according to the creator this cute white kitten transmogrified from an anthropomorphised kitten into a girl.
Five apples
And here’s the funny bit. A very strange admission by the creator. Hello Kitty weighs three apples and is five apples tall, which tells us that this is not a real girl but a girl that is in one’s imagination. Girls are not five apples tall 😉 and girls don’t weigh three apples 😀. This is a miniature human being. A teeny tiny human being. More mystery and more confusion perhaps but perhaps more about, as I said, one’s imagination. You decide what you think Hello Kitty is.
