Abstract:
While ACGN culture became one of the most eye-catching subcultures of Japan, an unique genre of stage performance carrying the features of those amazing things also entered the area of theatre arts. This project focus on observing the growth and the trends of 2.5 dimensional stages between March 2017 to March 2019, exploring the traits of themes and audiences with geographical and time distribution.” Idol” has been found to be the most popular theme, and the plays are very concentrated in Greater Tokyo Area. Metanalysis is presented in the result. Keywords: 2.5d, 2.5-dimensional stages, subculture, Japan, Theatre Art, ACGN, otaku
Introduction:
From a report from The Association of Japanese Animations (2019), the market of generalized Japanese animations has expanded to 21.527 billion JPY, which is about 200 million USD in 2017. ACGN, stands for Animes (Japanese animations), Comics(especially manga), Games and Novels(in this context, light-novels), weighs heavily in both Japanese and global culture and market.
As a new genre which just entered the world of theater arts in these decades, it’s very interesting to see what features make these kinds of shows popular. There are several frequently seen themes in 2.5-dimensional stages, some of them are also common themes of traditional Japanese theatre art, for example, History and love stories. There are also themes that don't usually appear in traditional theatre arts. For example Idols and Sports. These themes, which are rarely being adapted to theatre arts, benefitted from the audiences and producers of 2.5-dimensional stages and expanded the possibility of theatre arts. Also, since the traditional theatre arts are more considered as a high-class entertainment, the 2.5-dimensional stages created another entry for common people to understand the theatre art culture.imes or games which take place in the 2-dimensional world.” However, it becomes a little controversial if the script and the settings of the stage are intentionally mocking a non-exist manga, or the stage itself is in a part of a multimedia project which includes an unreleased animation.
As a new genre which just entered the world of theater arts in these decades, it’s very interesting to see what features make these kinds of shows popular. There are several frequently seen themes in 2.5-dimensional stages, some of them are also common themes of traditional Japanese theatre art, for example: History and love stories. There are also themes that don't usually appear in traditional theatre arts. For example Idols and Sports. These themes, which are rarely being adapted to theatre arts, benefitted from the audiences and producers of 2.5-dimensional stages and expanded the possibility of theatre arts. Also, since the traditional theatre arts are more considered as a high-class entertainment, the 2.5-dimensional stages created another entry for common people to understand the theatre art culture.imes or games which take place in the 2-dimensional world.” However, it becomes a little controversial if the script and the settings of the stage are intentionally mocking a non-exist manga, or the stage itself is in a part of a multimedia project which includes an unreleased animation.
As a new genre which just entered the world of theater arts in these decades, it’s very interesting to see what features make these kinds of shows popular. There are several frequently seen themes in 2.5-dimensional stages, some of them are also common themes of traditional Japanese theatre art, for example: History and love stories. There are also themes that don't usually appear in traditional theatre arts. For example: Idols and Sports. These themes, which are rarely being adapted to theatre arts, benefitted from the audiences and producers of 2.5-dimensional stages, and expanded the possibility of theatre arts. Also, since the traditional theatre arts are more considered as a high-class entertainment, the 2.5-dimensional stages created another entry for common people to understand the theatre art culture.
The theme of 2.5-dimensional stages, or say the concept of ACGN itself is commonly seen as “stand on the contrary side of reality.” However, despite its deviation from reality, the fad of 2.5-dimensional musicals and the topics which seem to be soon adapted to 2.5-dimensional musicals posed a huge effect on Japanese society. The creations seemed to carry fans’ passion for 2 dimensional or 2.5-dimensional worlds to reality successfully. For example, with the effect of one of the most popular topics (which has been adapted into series of musicals and another form of theatre arts, animations, and a movie)”刀剣乱舞)”, a crowdfunding project of recovery one of the Japanese sword “蛍丸” ( Hatarumaru , appears as a character in this topic) reached its target (5.5 million Japanese dollars, about 50,000 USD) in 5 hours, and ended up with 45,120,000 JPY (about 407,568 USD) In 2017, another popular character (sword) being displayed in the Ashikaga Museum of Art, and create 40 billion JPY economical effect for the region in a month. There are more positive effects like with the publication of a game featuring great names in Japanese writers, a non-profit website which releases the text of those masterpieces (which copyright had expired) received a large number of volunteer proofreaders.
In the same report being mentioned at the beginning of the introduction, AJA indicated that despite the closed economy tradition of the Japanese market, the association accents the truth that the size of the global market has grown to be as important as the domestic market. The 2.5-dimensional musicals also are not only popular in Japan, but they are also being loved by a group of people in China and Taiwan. In March 2018, a musical based on Chinese mobile game 「陰陽師」went on stage in both China and Japan. It’s not the first musical that went aboard, but is probably the first one with its original work created outside of Japan.
Theatre arts, different from movies, are mainly limited by time and space. This feature makes it sounds difficult for these plays to be spread. Live-viewing (a real-time broadcasting mostly held in movie theaters in Japan, sometimes in Taiwan, Korea, China etc.) and online broadcasting products of these theatre shows are being sold to a big group of people who could not manage for theater. However, it’s not common for these plays to have captions. For those who cannot understand Japanese, not a lot of options could enter this entertainment area. Fortunately, one of the biggest online video platforms in China, Bilibili, bought the rights to some 2.5-dimensional musicals and allow their premium members to view it whenever they want. Official captions in these videos indeed increase the accessibility of 2.5-dimensional stages. Hopefully there would be more and more language-friendly videos so that the 2.5-dimensional stages could be as popular as other genres under the general ACGN industry.
This project mainly discusses the trends of 2.5-dimensional musicals in 8 seasons between 2017 to 2019. The trend discussed in this project contains themes, scales, and geographical, time distribution of the plays.
Methodologies:
To satisfy the need of the project, the writer collected sets of data containing the title, number of plays, dates, and theater information from March 2017 to March 2019. The list of the plays and related information is being collected from the archives of the Association of 2.5 Dimensional Musical’s official website and individual sites for each show. The themes of the topic are being added after a brief research on the topics. Serial or related plays are marked by titles in case of cleaning up the dataset. The dataset is limited due to the accessibility for the understanding of the topic and the blurred line between 2.5 dimensional and those are not. The scale of each topic is calculated by the capacity of the theater and the number of the plays, no matter if the tickets are sold out or not. The writer considers this as the expected popularity of the producers, which could prevent the data being influenced by accidents. 357 plays (the play with the same title but located in more than one place being defined as different play) under 177 titles are being collected from the internet and consist of the play dataset.
For the geographical information, 3 layers of information is being organized in the set. Area code, the name of the county and the district. (Varied in oversea data, which in area code oversea, the second distribution would be country and the third one would be a city) Instead of precise geographical location, the writer decided to use more general area information for most data analysis tasks. The location of the theaters is being categorized as 4 areas, which are E for Kanto( the eastern part of Japan), W for Kansai (the western part of Japan), C for Central and others, and O for Overseas. The purpose of doing that is because of the convenience of the traffic system in Japan. The detailed geographical information, however, would not be excluded from the project. The data of the total population is collected from the population ranking website https://uub.jp/rnk/p_j.html. Although travel from area to area is not as difficult as impossible, the writer would ignore the factor of traveling and compare the population with the total attendance in play-dense areas.
The time attribution of the plays are labeled by season, which January to March, April to June, July to September, and October to December being defined as Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. This division of time is based on the entertainment tradition of Japan's entertainment industry. In that tradition, 3 months is considered a season, which is 12~13 episodes for a weekly TV show. Most of the entertainments in Japan still follow this calendar.
Since the purpose of the project is to understand and observe the trend of 2.5-dimensional stages/musicals, the writer would dig deeper and make hypotheses on the result of the theme analysis. For the general growth,the writer would use a dataset extracted from an annual report provided by pia, one of the major ticket-selling platforms, and described the growth of 2.5-dimensional stages from 2000 ~ 2017. The data of 2018 hasn’t been released at the point this paragraph being written, the writer would see market value as a related value of attendance and use it as the data of 2018.
Results:
1. General Distribution
Generally, there are 190 titles of the 2.5-dimensional stage between season 2018 Winter to season 2018 Autumn in the dataset. For a quick comparison, there are 171 titles in 2017 based on Pia’s annual reports. It’d be difficult to say how did the website define title because of the lack of information, but the writer imagines the plays would be a similar factor in this context. The season of the dataset started at the 2017 Spring to 2019 Spring, which includes 357 titles in the dataset. (See Appendix)
Visualizations beneath describing the time and geographical distribution of 2.5-dimensional stages between 2017 Spring to 2019 Spring. Interestingly, there are more shows out of Kansai and Kanto area in the winter seasons, however, plays with a large scale (over 60K) are tending to perform in Spring and Autumn.
Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, which there is no surprise to learn that most 2.5-d stages performed in the area. As the capital and the center of entertainment, a large proportion of young actors, producers live in Tokyo. In the dataset, there is no single title that didn’t perform in the Greater Tokyo Area but perform in other areas. The plays which performed in Area C (out of Kansai and Greater Tokyo) is highly overlapped the plays performed in Kansai. Kansai is the second population intensive area in Japan, which includes Kyoto, Mie, Nara, Hyogo, Osaka, and Shiga. Being the frontier capital of Japan, Kyoto is a city of culture and traditions. Take a closer look at the distribution of the stages, it could easily see that the titles performed in Area C are usually with little attendance. The comparison of the district population and the attendance is as below, simply calculate by attendance/population *100. In the figure it shows a landslide that how all the stages are concentrated in Tokyo. Moreover, most if not all of the leading districts are located in the Greater Tokyo Area and Kansai Area. On the map these it’s even easier to identify these two populous areas. Interestingly, the more the area populous, furthermore than more stages performed in the area.
The live viewing location strategy is very similar to the strategy of plays, which is slightly different from the anticipation of the author, which assumes live viewing would be more important in districts that the audiences cannot attend to the theater for the stages. However, districts which no stages being performed do benefit from the live-viewing service. With the outlier Tokyo the regression of the line is low.
2. Theme Analysis:
The result of the theme analysis shows that the most common appeared themes in 2017~2019 are Idols, Sports, history, ninja, and samurai, and the “Teenage JUMP” is the most popular base resources. Teenage JUMP is a well-known manga magazine which is the most popular paper-based manga platform in Japan. Much worldwide famous manga series was originated from the magazine. For example, “Kuroko’s Basketball” and “The Prince of Tennis” are both serialized on JUMP. Teenage Jump contributed to a high proportion of sport- theme stages. Another popular attribute of 2.5d stages is classical animation, which means the producer of stages adapted animations that were popular and still being known in these years to the stages. Many of them are produced as a part of memorial events, or use as the advertisement of the re-make animation. The common factor in these 2 themes is publicity, which means even the theatre arts are considered time-limited and space-limited, which only allow amounts of audiences to participate in the shows, the reputation of the works does increase the possibility of being adapted into stages.
On the contrary, the idol is a unique theme of stages. It’s extremely popular these years. In a free-research conducted by @iamNatsco in 2017, there were 638 male idol characters being active on 2017. The concept of 2-dimensional idols is similar to the common animate character, but would debut as a singer and would keep acting in a demi-reality timeline. The 2.5-dimensional idol stages are more complicated. Basically, actors are acting these “half-real” characters which casting by other voice actors and perform dances these idols would perform on their 3D projection live (vice versa, depends on which happens first.) In these plays, interactive performances such as dancing lives and mimic concerts. While stages are been seeing as a part of the multimedia project, it’s difficult to identify if it’s “based on” an existed work. The audiences of the idol stages are often more royal than other genres, although these works are not as famous as other works, it could still hold a large number of attendances.
More stages are being produced nearly simultaneously with the animation than adapted from an old one. Using 2.5d as an advertisement strategy(公野勉. ,2014) or as an expansion of the animation stories became more and more common. According to “The business of Anime Live” written by 公野勉, the more long-life the series the more attendances to the stages.
Discussion:
Japanese entertainment market often is seeing as a unique market. One of the best examples is that while “Avenger: Endgame” dominated the global movie market, it still cannot beat the local movies. Detective Conan animation movie was released on April 12th, stayed in the top spot for the Japanese box office for three weeks until Avengers: Endgame came along and dethroned it, and went back to its top spot, beating both Pokémon Detective Pikachu and Avengers: Endgame. The popularity of 2.5-dimensional stages could probably provide some clues for entering the market. Interestingly, the Marvel Universe and the fad of superheroes is, in some ways similar to 2.5-dimensional works: The original works are comics, and actor/actress who casting the characters are being viewed as the characters themselves in fans’ eyes.
The Japanese movie industry has changed by the stages. In 2019, the movie version of Toukenranbu was released. Different from the other Anime-based movies which did not earn the reputations from the fans, the movie which shared part of the production teams and actors with the 2.5d stage successes winning the heart of fans. In other relatively animation/manga-based movies like “Gintama” and “Rurouni Kenshin”, similar attributes could be seen. The deviation from reality (by levels) and the romanticism seem to be important factors of an ACGN adaption. The author would want to explore the factors which bring the characters into the 2.5 dimension and create works that could persuade the fans. The author would look forward to conducting interviews with the audiences (for both who live in Tokyo or Osaka and who has to take a trip for the play), the producers and the actors of the stages if possible.
Except for the possibility of entering the Japanese entertainment market, the otaku subculture itself also became more and more international. From a report from The Association of Japanese Animations (2019), the oversea market of the general animation and manga has expanded and grown importance in this industry. 2.5- dimensional stages/musicals, as a space-limited genre of entertainment might eventually have the chance to enter the global market just as other animation-related businesses did. From the geographical aspect, although the project was limited on acquiring the data of the online video renting service, the author still believes the 2.5d stages could work more on expanding the market of live-viewing to increase publicity.
The combination of theatre art and animations not only opens a door for younger audiences entering the world of theatre art but also enhances the link between reality and the virtual world. By bringing the anime character into real-life, their influences become even bigger. In 栗本涼花’s “Viewing Japanese Culture By Identifying the Relationship Between Toukenranbu – ONLINE – and museums”(2018), she mentioned about how do the works increase the amounts and the interests of the museum visitors. The interaction between society and entertainment worth more attention.
The marketing strategy of using 2.5d stages to expand the life of the works is inspiring and charming, however, the effect of the advertisement is specious. The author is interested in how do these musicals and stages influence the engagement of fans and the popularities of the works, do the stages shared the audiences with the animations, and the life cycle of the titles. Last but not the least, although the author did try to include the information of the stages, the information collected for this project is not flawless. The data and the analysis could only be viewed as a glance of the 2.5d industry.
Resources:
The Association of Japanese Animations. (2019). Retrieved from The statical data of 2 dimensional male idols, @imNatsco. )(2017). Retrieced from http://iam- natsco.hateblo.jp/entry/2017/02/19/%E3%80%90%E5%BA%8F%E7%AB%A0%E3%80%91%E4%BA%8C%E 6%AC%A1%E5%85%83%EF%BD%A5%E7%94%B7%E6%80%A7%E3%82%A2%E3%82%A4%E3%83%89 %E3%83%AB%E3%82%92%E8%80%83%E3%81%88%E3%82%8B%E3%80%82%E3%80%90583%E4%B A%BA%E3%80%91 栗本涼花. (2018). ゲーム 「刀剣乱舞-ONLINE-」 と博物館の関係から見る日本文化. 日本学報, 37, 149-171.公野勉. (2014). アニメライブのビジネス構造について. 経営論集, 24(1), 67-80. The statical data of the industry, http://aja.gr.jp/jigyou/chousa/sangyo_toukei The growth of 2.5 dimensional stages in 2018 Corporate.pia.jp. (2018). Retrieved from https://corporate.pia.jp/news/files/2.5%E6%AC%A1%E5%85%83_%E6%99%82%E7%B3%BB%E5%88%97%E6%8E%A 8%E7%A7%BB_2017%E5%B9%B4.pdf Barder, O. (2019). While 'Avengers: Endgame' Dominates Globally, Japan Is All About A New 'Detective Conan' Movie. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2019/05/12/while-avengers-endgame-dominates-globally-japan- is-all-about-a-new-detective-conan-movie/#3feff8065e60 増山賢治. (2014). 日本の創作ミュージカルの新潮流としての 2.5 次元ミュージカルに関する一考察: その展開とカテゴリ ー形成をめぐって. 愛知県立芸術大学紀要= The bulletin of Aichi University of the Arts, (44), 127-138. Between Real and Virtual Observation of the trend in 2.5-dimensional stage from 2017~2019
Appendix:
The dataset collected and created for this project.
https://app.box.com/s/6eiiu3m6ncngz7vbabqtn9z4q2c6v2ab