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Enhance your texting with new Line stamps featuring Totoro, Catbus, and more!

totoro2

Let Totoro do the talking next time you’re at a loss for words!

Free text and calling service Line has certainly been a hit in Japan and around the world. Obviously, part of their success is offering a decent service for the price of zero, but they’re not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts! A company has to monetize, of course, and Line has proven to be particularly good at getting people to buy their stamps — images that can be inserted into any text conversation. Featuring greater variety than standard emoji and all sorts of official images produced by popular content creators, stamps are an excellent source of income for Line.

And we have a feeling their margins are about to swell, thanks to new stamps featuring none other than Studio Ghibli’s own Totoro!

▼ All these are yours for 240 yen (about US$2.20).

With forty total stamps, there’s likely to be something for most occasions — especially if you’re looking for something that’s a little silly. You probably wouldn’t want to use a Totoro stamp to lets your coworkers know you’ll be missing work, though.

▼ Then again, maybe it’ll make them more forgiving.

The base images for the stamps were drawn by Toshio Suzuki, a Studio Ghibili producer who worked on the original My Neighbor Totoro film. Apparently he approached the legendary Hayao Miyazaki about drawing the stamps, but the director thought Suzuki was talking about postage stamps. Upon explaining the concept more clearly, Miyazaki declined and illustration duties fell to Suzuki.

▼ The producer hard at work

In a Line Blog post, Suzuki discusses the creation of the stamps, going so far as to say that he’s better at drawing Totoro than Miyazaki anyway.

▼ We can’t really disagree!

▼ Magnifying glass Totoro is our favorite.

With all these delightful stamps, though, we now have a serious problem: Figuring out who to talk to! Maybe we can just send them to ourselves? Or use them to annoy Microsoft’s school girl AI Rinna!

As much as we love these stamps, we do kind of wish Suzuki had included a Grim Reaper-version of Totoro as well. It would be perfect for letting everyone know they better leave us alone in the morning!

Sources: Net Lab, Line Blog, Line Sticker Shop
Images: Line Sticker Shop

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