mascot characters on Pikachu

"Landep News"

Some people are claiming that a city in Yamaguchi prefecture based one of its mascot characters on Pikachu:

Ecoha is a character that was created last year to promote recycling in Ube city. Like the famous Pokémon character, Ecoha has big black eyes and red dots on its cheeks. When they made a mascot suit for Ecoha, it ended up looking similar to Pikachu.

However, when you look at the 2D versions of each character, it seems that Echo is quite different:

Ube city officials have acknowledged that there have been complaints about the resemblance between the two characters, but they have stressed the Ecoha is original and is not a copy of Pikachu.

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