게임 원작 애니메이션의 흥행성 연구 -일본, 미국, 한국 애니메이션을 중심으로- = A Study on the box office success of animation based on game –Focused on Japanese, American, and Korean animations–

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study can be said to analyze the success and failure of animations made based on games and to derive the elements necessary to make good original games. As a research method for this, the purpose of this study was to compare and analyze the original animations of games in Japan, the United States, and Korea to investigate the effect of the cultural industry structure and audience characteristics by country on box office success. To this end, the background and industrial context of the original animation production of games in three countries were reviewed, and according to what strategic needs and market logic each country converted game IP to animation was analyzed. In addition, a qualitative comparative analysis was performed centering on representative cases. Success stories were selected from Japan’s Pokémon and the US’s Arkane, and failure examples were selected from Japan’s Final Fantasy: Spirit Within, US’s Halo: Legends, and Korea’s Maple Story. The scope of analysis was set from the late 1990s to the early 2020s, and the box office evaluation comprehensively considered theater profits, platform viewing indicators, criticism evaluation, and fandom response. Through this, the theoretical expansion and practical implications of the research on convergence content between games and animations were derived.
As a result of the study, successful examples such as “Pokémon” and “Arcane” secured popular universality through narrative reconstruction and media transformation appropriate to the historical and cultural context while maintaining the identity of the original work. On the other hand, “Final Fantasy: Spirit Within”, “Halo: Legends”, and “Maple Story” failed to effectively convert the original experience due to technical obsession, lack of narrative consistency, and gap with the audience. These analysis results suggest that the success of the original game animation is not limited to simple IP utilization, but depends on the narrative reconstruction that faithfully translates the original experience, the character and drama structure that induces emotional immersion, the planning that considers the consistency with the target audience, and fourth, the strategic use of the global platform and distribution network. Therefore, the implication of this study is that the balance between original fidelity and creative transformation is essential in future game-based animation research, which is meaningful in that it provides a strategic guide for the possibility of expanding game and animation convergence research academically and for successful franchise construction industrially.