Interest

Kemono Friends Boosts Zoo's Attendance by 20,000 for Golden Week

The collaboration project between the Kemono Friends anime and the Tobu Zoo in Saitama proved wildly successful as it boosted attendance to the zoo by 23.6% from last year during the nine-day Golden Week period. 91,754 people visited the zoo last year from April 29 to May 7, compared to this year's attendance of 113,404 people.

However, the zoo saw an even bigger spike in attendance in 2013: about 140,000 people visited over Golden Week while the zoo was celebrating the birth of baby white tigers and holding a Momoiro Clover Z event.

For the Kemono Friends collaboration, 26 character images have been installed in animal exhibits around the zoo, and a special one minute recording by the voice of Raccoon, Saki Ono, is being broadcast periodically throughout the park. The zoo was also selling original can badges, though the popular badges sold out on opening day within an hour and a half, so more are expected on May 13.

The collaboration began on April 22 and will end on June 25. Four more zoos — Sapporo Maruyama Zoo, Chiba Zoological Park, Kyoto Municipal Zoo, and Fukuoka Municipal Zoo — are selling collaboration goods until May 31. Kemono Friends is also getting its own line of cookies in collaboration with the Kumamoto Zoo.

The Kemono Friends anime, which was part of a multimedia project that included the Nexon smartphone game of the same name, aired from January to March 2017 and was streamed by Crunchyroll. The series is getting a new video project, smartphone game, and stage play.

Source: Yahoo! News Japan via Yaraon!