This article is from WeChat official account: three entertainment (ID: hi3wyu) , author: KUsari, from the title figure: si mi-gu っ U ra shi official twitter @ sumikko_335
Corner Creatures is a anthropomorphic virtual character series launched by the Japanese company San-X. It is set as a soft and cute image who likes to hide in corners and is not confident. It is collectively called-Corner Creatures.
With its high popularity, the corner creature won the “Japan Virtual Character Awards 2019” the most popular award. In the year of 2019, the sales of Corner Biotechnology reached 20 billion yen.
San-X, the company that created these popular characters, is a stationery company founded in 1932. After eighty-eight years of development, San-X has become known to the public with its virtual character images.
For 8 years, cross-border cooperation based on IP “corner biology”
In 2012, San-X designed a series of virtual character images based on the Japanese psychology of loving corners.
The characters in this series mainly have cornersObjects (main role) and mini creatures (supporting role) . What all the characters have in common is their negative personality, like corners, etc.
Top row: From left to right are white bear, penguin, tonkatsu, cat, lizard
Bottom row: From left to right are baggage, weeds, fried shrimp tails, pearls, black pearls
There are two main target audiences of Corner Bio: one is the family audience with children as the center, and the other is the youth group of 20-30 years old.
In Japan, virtual character products with these two types of audiences are relatively rare. From the fan portraits of Corner Creatures, we can see that the number of adult males is increasing, and many of them start contacting them because their children or girlfriends like Corner Creatures. After contact, they began to pay attention to the corner creature’s products, LINE emoticons, games and books, and they were slowly healed by the world created by the corner creature.
In this way, the corner creature has become a popular virtual character in Japan.
1. Expand the value of IP and promote a variety of content
While the popularity of corner creatures is soaring, San-X has also begun to expand the value of IP by launching picture books, offline theme activities, big movies, games and other content.
For example, in March 2014, San-x released the first picture book of Corner Creatures, “Corner Creatures: The Most At ease here.” After this work went viral,Several picture books have been released.
From July 17th to August 1st, 2017, the animation train with the theme of corner creatures runs.
On November 8, 2019, the 7th anniversary of Corner Creatures, Corner Creatures Theater Edition “Corner Creatures 3D Picture Book and Mysterious Son” (Japanese: Movie すみっコぐらしとびだす絵本とひみつのコ） was released in Japan and the picture book was also published.
“Corner Creatures 3D Picture Book and Mysterious Child” ranked third at the box office of domestic movies in the first week of its release. In the third week of its release, 580,000 people were mobilized and box office revenue exceeded 700 million yen. (as of November 28). Even after the hit movie “Frozen 2” was released, the corner creature theater version has entered the top 5 box office charts for three consecutive weeks.
In 2019, “Corner Creatures: 3D Picture Book and Mysterious Child” won the Japanese Film Critics Animation Award. On July 10th of this year, the animation film “Corner Friends: New Friends in the Magic Picture Book”, directed by the well-known animation director Wan Jiu and the animation team Fanworks, was released in Japan.
Corner Biology Theater Edition
When the movie “Corner Creatures: 3D Picture Book and Mysterious Child” was released in 2019, a picture book of the same name was also released.
In terms of games, it is mainly based on the Nintendo platform. Since 2014, “Corner Creatures: Feel at ease to live here”, “Corner Creatures: Come to Shop”, “Corner Creatures: Build a Village” and “Corner Creatures:” Where is this? Four 3DS platform games. Since then, these four games have been registered on the Switch platform in the form of a collection, priced at 5,800 yen.