Beastars Announces Live-Action Stage Play

Beastars has just wrapped its first season, immediately announcing that the second season of the franchise has been confirmed. Wasting little time, Beastars has also announced that a live action stage play will be in the works, taking actors and placing them into garish outfits to resemble the anthropomorphic characters of the franchise. With numerous anime series such as Naruto, Bleach, Sailor Moon, Yu Yu Hakusho, and My Hero Academia getting stage plays of their own in the past, its not too big of a surprise to see this against the grain series get a play of its own!

Twitter User AitaiKiMochi shared the first details about the upcoming stage play, along with the first images of the actors portraying some of the characters of the world where “predator and prey” is the name of the game, following the rules of a dark version of Disney’s Zootopia:

Beastars has already finished its run in Japan via the streaming service of Netflix, though a release date for North America has yet to be confirmed. Netflix has stated that the anime series will be releasing “first thing” this year so fans may not have to wait long to experience the franchise here in the west.

The stage play will be releasing in Japan for a limited run in April and May of this year, clearly going the full nine yards with making the actors look like their anthropomorphic counterparts. As noted earlier, a slew of anime franchises have been given stage plays of their own in Japan and maybe one day we’ll be able to experience some of these plays in the West.

What do you think of the announcement of the Beastars stage play? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and Beastars!

Beastars was originally created by Paru Itagaki for Akita Shonen’s Weekly Shonen Champion in 2016, and has run for 14 volumes so far. The series has been licensed for an English language release by Viz Media, and they describe it as such, “Instead of Jocks and Nerds, the Students Are Divided into Predators and Prey. One night at Cherryton Academy, an herbivore student is brutally murdered. Among the members of the Drama Club, the herbivores’ suspicions naturally turn to their carnivore classmates… The prime suspect? Wolf Legoshi. But he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Or would he? Will dwarf rabbit Haru bring out the beast in him? Or are his feelings for her…something else?”