Belle “Animersive Live” in Tokyo Turns Phones into Stage Effects, With hololive’s AZKi as Guest

Based on MoguLive’s hands-on report and the production committee’s published details. Ticket prices and showtimes were not stated in the sources we could open, so check the official ticket page before planning a visit.

At a glance

• What: “Animersive Live: Belle – PROJECT LAYRA –”, a theatre show set in the virtual world U from Mamoru Hosoda’s 2021 anime film Belle.
• Where: MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives (Box1000), Takanawa, Tokyo.
• When: October 10 to November 15, 2026 (still running as of this article).
• Hook for virtual-culture fans: hololive production’s AZKi appears as a guest performer, and the audience’s own smartphones become part of the stage effects.
• Overseas access: the sources describe a Tokyo-only run; no overseas screening or stream was mentioned.

Official music video for “I am LAYRA” (starring miwa), posted on the Echoes channel.

What the show is

“Animersive live” is the label the organisers use for a hybrid of anime, immersive theatre and a concert. According to MoguLive’s report, which calls it the first show of its kind, the idea is to rebuild the film’s virtual world, “U”, inside a physical room so that everyone in the audience takes part as a resident of that world rather than as a spectator. The report says no knowledge of the film is required: a short pre-show video explains the setting, and the essential premise is simply that you are attending a music festival in U as an avatar.

The story is a spin-off set five years after the film and, notably, does not feature the film’s title characters Belle or the Dragon. Instead, the producer who made Belle famous, nicknamed Hiro-chan, discovers a new artist called LAYRA and stages “Utopia”, described as the largest music festival in U. The synopsis adds that an unidentified avatar turns up among the festival crowd, which sets up the AI-related twist described below.

How the technology works

MoguLive’s reporter describes a show in which the venue and the audience’s phones work together. On entry, a body scan is said to be completed and visitors are treated as avatars of U. The front area near the stage is standing, and the report says the people there help build the crowd’s energy. The staging combines a full-width LED display at the back, LED walls to the left and right, LED panels above the audience and three-dimensional LED elements on the stage itself. The report warns that a few seats have poor sightlines to the side screens.

The distinctive part is the smartphone integration. Visitors install an app called “TAKANAWA GATEWAY CITY”, scan a QR code and enter their seat number; at showtime the phone calibrates itself automatically and then plays audio and video in sync with the venue’s system. The report says SoVeC and Sony Group co-developed the phone-sync technology, that phones can play individual crowd voices and lines, and that the screen can act like a penlight. Its practical advice is to arrive with a fully charged phone, or a power bank, and to set the volume to maximum.

The performers, including AZKi

The title character is LAYRA (real-world name Kotomi), and the role is shared: five singers play her, namely miwa, Natsumi Kon, Konomi Suzuki, Maria Miki and ASCA. The cast changes by performance, and the reviewer’s dress rehearsal featured miwa. A second music video on the same channel, “Hallucination”, is the song performed in the AI storyline: after a stage malfunction, an autonomous AI character called Pack scans the LAYRA performer and creates an AI duplicate who sings it.

Official music video for “Hallucination” (Echoes channel).

For readers of this site, the main draw is the guest slot. MoguLive reports that AZKi of hololive production performs two songs in special arrangements during the festival scene, and the arrangements are credited to TeddyLoid according to a post by the show’s official “Hiro-chan” account. The songs named are “intersection (Utopia Live ver.)” and “without U (Utopia Live ver.)”. A separate press release carried by Japanese outlets also says AZKi appears early in the show as a performer at Utopia, though it does not say what she sings.

Background: virtual idols and live staging

Belle was already a story about a global online world where people perform and are discovered through music, so staging it as a live event follows naturally. For the VTuber audience the interesting precedent is how the production blends a real virtual performer, a human-sung character and an AI character in one fiction. The organisers behind the show are the museum itself and a production committee that, per the report, includes the East Japan Railway Culture Foundation, Sony Group, Sony Music Entertainment (Japan), Nippon Television Network, BS Nippon Television, Lawson Entertainment and NO MORE Inc., with Studio Chizu cooperating and J-WAVE supporting. MoN Takanawa, according to the report, opened as a theatre in March 2026.

What we don’t know yet

• Ticket prices, showtimes and age limits were not given in the report we could open.
• Whether the show will tour, be recorded or be streamed outside Japan has not been announced in these sources.
• Which LAYRA actress performs on a given day is variable, so overseas visitors cannot choose a specific singer unless the ticket page says so.

How to book from abroad

Tickets are sold through a Japanese ticketing site (Lawson Ticket’s l-tike), linked from the official show site at animmersive.jp/ryusoba. Because those pages are in Japanese, overseas fans may want to use a browser translation tool or ask a friend in Japan to buy for them. The run ends on November 15, so travellers have roughly three weeks left from the date of this article.

Sources

• MoguLive (MoguraVR): hands-on report on the animersive live, Oct 22, 2026
• Inside Games (PR TIMES release): AZKi appearance announcement, Oct 10, 2026
• Time Out Tokyo: event overview (Japanese)
• MoN Takanawa press release, Aug 11, 2026 (PDF)

Reviewed by WVR Inoue on October 23, 2026. See our editorial standards.

Thumbnail: LAYRA「わたしはLAYRA starring miwa」Music Video by Echoes on YouTube. Shown via YouTube; all rights belong to their owners.