The cat’s out of the bag.
On the 50th anniversary of Hello Kitty, fans were shocked to learn that their beloved cat-inspired character is, in fact, not a feline at all.
“Hello Kitty is not a cat,” Jill Cook, the director of retail business development at Sanrio, the creators of the iconic cartoon, told Today. “She’s actually a little girl.”
In fact, she’s a tiny girl — who “weighs three apples” and stands five apples tall — raised in the London suburbs with her twin sister Mimmy, their parents and even her own pet cat.
But fans of the widely celebrated character are not so convinced of this fact, while some were gobsmacked that Hello Kitty resided in the UK.
“She has cat ears and whiskers???” one dismayed user wrote on TikTok.
“If she has ears like a cat, has whiskers like a cat, she is probably just a little girl,” quipped another.
“So she has whiskers, ears, and is named ‘Kitty,’ but is actually human? What?” an aghast viewer commented.
“She’s British?!” someone else said.
According to anthropologist and author Christine R. Yano, “the Japanese and Japanese women were into Britain” at the time of Hello Kitty’s conception, she previously told the Los Angeles Times.
“They loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealized childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So, the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time,” she explained, adding that Hello Kitty is, in fact, “a little girl.”
Back in 2014 for the cartoon’s 40th anniversary, Sanrio “very firmly” corrected Yano when differentiating between Hello Kitty’s identity as a little girl and her feline features.
“She is a friend. But she is not a cat,” Yano said. “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.”
Half a century after the creation of Hello Kitty, which launched in 1974, a slew of festivities are cropping up around the nation to celebrate this year, from a pop-up shop in the NYC Nordstrom flagship to an exclusive Van Leeuwen ice cream flavor, Yummy Berry White Chocolate Truffle Ice Cream, available for one day only on National Ice Cream Day, which falls on July 21.
“An ambassador of friendship and kindness for the past 50 years, Hello Kitty has touched so many people globally and we want to share our appreciation for her fans by offering memorable Hello Kitty-inspired experiences — both IRL and digitally — all year long,” Craig Takiguchi, the chief operating officer of Sanrio, Inc., which is planning a host of celebratory events this year, said in a statement provided to The Post.