Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/04/animated-playstation-ad-vanish.html
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"Bao! Get your ass in my office! Now! I want to yell at you in person first before firing you." - Some Sony executive, probably.
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the internet has done quite a lot to shed light on plagiarism. things like this would go about unnoticed back in the day.
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ok, but the cat? if you made me draw a cat right now I probably would draw something similar, that’s what cat bodies look like.
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I guess the Peloton ad doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
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Just playing the Devil’s advocate:
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At what point does this become transformative? As segues with game clips and music, do the imitated clips become something new that doesn’t affect the market for the original material?
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How would one compare this to the Obama Hope image by Shepard Fairy?
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What are the norms in Japan for this kind of re-use? In the U.S., we have lots of grey zones when it comes to transformative works, short quotes, allusion, fair use, etc.
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Yiiiikes.
Plagiarism is something like animation is kind of hard to call out. There are homages, there are questions about what the substance of a scene is and what is just stylistic choices that anyone could make, there are different people who simply had similar ideas.
And then you cross the know-it-when-you-see-it Rubicon and you get this.
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It’s common knowledge that tracing/rotoscoping is used in a lot of animation from Japanese studios, but this is the first recursive example I’ve been made aware of. /s
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I’m impressed by the effort that went into making the plagiarism video itself. I suppose these animators happened to watch this video, recognized their work, and passed it around in rapid succession?
I mean, FLCL has an iconic style, but it came out in 2003! I guess someone out there has watched it enough times that they managed to easily pick out the couple of seconds of problematic footage?
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Not only the drawing style, but the timing of the animation on the cat is lifted from the Thea Glad source.
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Those are indeed some very swipey swipes.
I guess the silver lining here is that the comparison prompted me to check out some new animations that I wasn’t previously aware of. Judging from youtube’s comment sections, I’m not the only one.
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My opinion on the first point: This would be transformative if it attributed the source material and/or was clearly intended as such, but since it’s tracing animations for an ad with no indication that it’s some kind of remix, this falls pretty clearly into the plagiarism category for me.
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Having read a lot more comics than I have watched anime, I’m actually pleasantly surprised by how much they’ve transformed it from the original material. By comparison, half the stuff, say, Greg Land did for Marvel was just traced from internet porn and memes, and clearly n one called him on it loudly enough to make a difference.
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This kind of work is very time consuming and exceedingly difficult, and it’s in super-high demand in advertising and entertainment at the moment, so it doesn’t surprise me that this happened…
Just a guess, but I’d wager that it was a mad-rush to create these titles sequences that led to such blatant copying. With a tight deadline, it would be difficult to create entirely new work, so they just took the shortest path to completion. Hell, the animator may have even been given a rough cut of other animation to work from that was assembled by an editor… Not that any of that excuses plagiarism, but it might explain how it could have happened.
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Let’s wait until Bao finishes tracing it before we decide on that.
If I wanted to get away with plagiarizing like this, anime would be my last choice. From my admittedly biased perspective few genres get watched, re-watched, drawn, obsessed on like Anime.
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