Belle Spinoff Animersive Live Opens at MoN Takanawa With Smartphone App
The production turns the audience's own phones into part of the staging, so the venue's immersion depends on a device the crowd already carries rather than on the screen alone.
Reporting from 1 source: MoguLive.
A spinoff story set five years after Mamoru Hosoda's film Belle has opened at MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives Box1000 in Takanawa, Tokyo. Titled Belle - PROJECT LAYRA -, the animersive live follows LAYRA, a new artist produced by Hiro-chan, at a music festival inside the virtual world U. Before the show, audiences install the TAKANAWA GATEWAY CITY app and calibrate their phones inside the venue.
The venue opened in March 2026 and its theater has LED displays across the stage front and both side walls. Thirty minutes before showtime the screens already show the scenery of U. A pre-show announcement tells the audience their bodies were scanned on entry and that they sit in the space as avatars, or As. Koga-ryu Ninja Ponpoko and Peanuts-kun appear as news anchors delivering updates from U, and Hiro-chan explains festival etiquette. A standing area in front of the stage carries the music festival atmosphere. The smartphone app TAKANAWA GATEWAY CITY handles seat-number entry and calibration.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.