Summary
- GKIDS acquired licensing for the movie COLORFUL STAGE!, announcing an April 11 North American release with English subtitles.
- COLORFUL STAGE! is based on Projekt Sekai: Colorful Stage feat. Hatsune Miku, representing her first full-length anime film.
- The release of COLORFUL STAGE! with English subs shows growing international accessibility and potential for more anime releases abroad.
This week brought good news to any North American Hatsune Miku fans that have been waiting for news of a release date and English subtitles for the upcoming movie COLORFUL STAGE! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing (herein, COLORFUL STAGE!). Despite being announced last year, there were no confirmed international release dates or English-language versions. However, that all changed this week when the company GKIDS announced that they got the licensing for the upcoming movie, sharing both the release date of April 11th and an English-subbed trailer.
The news was shared via a press release by the anime news website AnimeNewsNetwork on Thursday. This is the first deal that GKIDS has made with CyberAgent, the company behind COLORFUL STAGE!. With only a short turn-around between the movie’s Japanese release date and its North American one, it shows the continued influence that anime is having recently on Western media. Fans will only have to wait a few short months to see the movie with English subtitles, in a theater, instead of waiting an unknown amount of time for the movie to come out online.
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COLORFUL STAGE! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing
Hatsune Miku’s First Movie
COLORFUL STAGE! is a very special movie, especially for VOCALOID fans. Miku has been around since 2007 as a software voicebank. The program was used by people, mostly in Japan, to create original music that Miku would sing. The VOCALOID world continued to grow over the next twenty years, with new characters to represent new voices joining, and plenty of video games based on the characters and the most popular music. Miku specifically has had an incredible cultural impact, influencing other games and anime that reference her or her music, being the subject of plenty of merchandise, and beloved by cosplayers around the world for her various outfits.
COLORFUL STAGE! is the first time that any VOCALOID has been turned into a full-length anime, though. The movie will be specifically based on the smartphone game Project Sekai: Colorful Stage feat. Hatsune Miku. The game was first released in Japan in 2020 before being released globally in December 2021. It also inspired a short-length anime Petit Seka that streamed for free on YouTube. Petit Seka has 10 episodes.
COLORFUL STAGE! is on a whole other level, though, as a feature-length movie showing in the movie theater. AnimeNewsNetwork describes the plot as,
The original story follows Ichika Hoshino, who hears a Miku song that she has never heard before at a CD shop and sees a Hatsune Miku whom she had never seen before. Ichika calls out to Miku, who surprised by the voice, disappears shortly after making eye contact. Miku later appears on Ichika’s smartphone to tell her that she would like to reach others with her songs, but no matter how much she sings, her songs cannot reach them. After seeing Ichika reach others’ hearts with her live street performance, Miku asks for her help.
Miku is voiced by Saki Fujita, who has brought Miku to life in other parts of the franchise as well.
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Miku Comes to North America
With English Subs, Too
While COLORFUL STAGE! was already a huge announcement in the anime world, bringing Hatsune Miku to the big screen, this week’s announcement is especially significant for international fans. While some Hatsune Miku games have finally been translated into English and are available to play outside of Japan (such as Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA), Miku has been generally inaccessible to people who do not speak Japanese. COLORFUL STAGE! getting an official English version and a release date in movie theaters is huge for the VOCALOID community.
GKIDS has announced that COLORFUL STAGE! will come to movie theaters in North America on April 11th, 2025. The movie originally opened in Japan on January 17th, 2025, coming in at #2 at the box office. The North American release will come less than three months later, which is an incredible turnaround, especially for an original movie not based on any smash-hit anime series.
The English-subbed trailer was released along with an English-language poster for the movie. Beyond the excitement that this brings for people who were already Hatsune Miku fans, if the movie can succeed in North America, it continues to open doors for other original anime movies to be released more widely outside of Japan. Anime is arguably earning a lot of money abroad, and when film studios see this, they want in on it. COLORFUL STAGE! can continue to pave the way for more anime movies to release in a timely fashion outside of Japan, in that country’s native language.
COLORFUL STAGE! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing comes to theaters in North America on April 11, 2025.
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Source: AnimeNewsNetwork