Last week, The Los Angeles Times broke the news of the century. Or so it would seem by the shockwaves it sent through the Internet.
From TMZ to The Wall Street Journal, media outlets of all kinds picked up the story, celebrities tweeted their disbelief, children’s reactions to the news went viral.
The ubiquitous, blank-faced and, as the world assumed, feline cartoon character Hello Kitty is not in fact a cat, announced The Los Angeles Times. It’s a little girl named Kitty White.
Kitty, also shockingly, has an entire backstory: She is British, lives in London with her parents, has a twin, and is a perpetual third-grader.
The Times quotes Christine R. Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii, who was preparing the written text for a retrospective of Hello Kitty art at the Japanese American National Museum. When fact-checking with Sanrio, the character’s mother company, she was “very firmly” corrected about Kitty’s identity.
“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,” Ms. Yano tells The Times. “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.”
Carolina A. Miranda, who wrote the Times story, added: “I grew up with Hello Kitty everything and all I have to say is, MIND BLOWN.”
The world shared her shock.
“Cat-astrophic revelation purr-turbs Hello Kitty fans,” reads a CNN headline.
“The revelation blew up my Twitter and Facebook feeds, which had about 10 times more posts about Kittygate than about the fact that, at that very moment, Russia was invading the Ukraine,” writes Euny Hong at Quartz.
Dude. Hello Kitty is not a cat, nor has she ever been a cat. Help. Nothing makes sense anymore.
— Gabe Bondoc (@gabebondoc) August 29, 2014
I just found out Hello Kitty isn’t a cat. She does appear to have whiskers. I’m not judging. I’m just piecing this all together for myself.
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) August 29, 2014
The singer Katy Perry rushed to reassure her fans of the feline identity of her cat and/or her mascot, Kitty Purry.
IT’S OKAY HELLO KITTY FANS, KITTY PURRY IS A CAT. — KATY PERRY (@katyperry) August 28, 2014
Because nothing seemed to be real anymore, people started questioning the species of other cartoon characters. What about the doglike character Goofy and his pet dog Pluto? Sponge Bob?
If Hello Kitty isn’t a cat then is Mickey Mouse not a mouse
— acee (@sica_forehead) August 28, 2014
Colin Stokes at The New Yorker jokingly suggested that Mickey Mouse, Scooby-Doo and the entire Winnie-the-Pooh crew were, in fact, human. Winnie, Eeyore, Piglet and Tigger are just part of a “role play” created for Christopher Robin’s sake.
“Why exactly these four men choose to wear these costumes for Christopher is unclear, but it has been speculated that they may owe him money from gambling debts,” Mr. Stokes writes.
Alas, the information about Hello Kitty’s identity proved to be not entirely precise. Brian Ashcraft of gaming blog Kotaku contacted Sanrio to clarify. A representativetold him: “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.” The representativeused the Japanese word “gijinka,” which means “anthropomorphization” or “personification.”
In the end, Sanrio says that Kitty is a character, so doesn’t fall in the categories we would use for, say, live human beings. But why is her identity so important —even if mockingly important —to so many people who have long abandoned their Hello Kitty backpacks and pencil cases?
“I’m glad Sanrio is showing us that we can indeed see cartoon characters however we want, and that we don’t need to put human or non-human labels on them,” Kitty Tan, a 36-year-old marketing manager, tells the Straits Times of Singapore. She said the clarification made more sense, because as a human Kitty made no logical sense. “These characters are meant to make us happy; they should not confuse us.”
Hello Kitty used to be two things —a blank, expressionless canvass for the viewer’s imagination, and a bit of an enigma. She is simple, she is alien, she is “delightfully inexplicable,” the comic author Scott McCloud tells Think Progress.
“In contrast to expressive American characters such as Mickey Mouse and Garfield, Hello Kitty doesn’t show emotions, and the simplicity has attracted fans from children to street fashion devotees,” writes Mari Yamaguchi for The Associated Press.
Asked about the clarification from Sanrio, Ms. Yano, the anthropologist who dropped the bombshell in the first place, said the character’s identity should be irrelevant: “Is she a cat, is she a girl, in Japanese terms, I really feel, it doesn’t matter. What I think is that Hello Kitty becomes a prompt for the imagination.”
Mr. McCloud says that there is more to bringing a character to life than just executing the actual drawing. “It’s a collaborative process of conjuring.” He suggests that there is something valuable about questioning our classifications and asking whether she is a cat. “Is she anything, other than this weird, astral projection of our idea of other consciousness?”
This veil of mystery has been lifted, the character has been defined. And it sent the world reeling.
