A recent promo video from PlayStation Japan has come under fire for apparently lifting entire animation sequences from movies like Steven Universe: The Movie, anime series like FLCL, and a whole mess of students films in addition to other smaller acts of plagiarism. Social media has been kicked into a frenzy as folks compare and contrast the promo with previous material to see just how much was taken from elsewhere. There appears to have been no official comment on the matter from PlayStation, but the evidence seems fairly damning.
Videos by ComicBook.com
While the original video appears to have been taken down, it’s the Internet, after all, and multiple reuploads exist across various platforms — and the original tweets promoting it appear to still be live as well as the Japanese PlayStation blog post. According to said post, the animation director is Kevin Bao, who has won awards for animation previously, but folks digging into their past work have uncovered what appears to be a history of lifting work from others.
You can check out a reuploaded version of the original video below:
A number of folks have been sharing clip comparisons between the video in question and other prominent animations from everything from work for Cartoon Network, anime, student films, and so on. The more that comes to light, the more likely it seems that just about every frame of animation is ripping off someone else.
It appears that @PlayStation_jp made a promo that swiped some of @porigoshi‘s animation from Steven Universe The Movie. This looks to be more of a direct trace than an homage:
(Steven Universe: The Movie first, @PlayStation Promo second) pic.twitter.com/k8Ru2IjION
— ianjq (@ianjq) December 4, 2019
Sequences from @PlayStation‘s Lineup Video compared with the originals by @gobelins_paris‘s students pic.twitter.com/YYE8hhOJsZ
— Insom (@insom_art) December 4, 2019
The director/animator of this Sony PS4 video is Kevin Bao.https://t.co/J291TdQStl
— Catsuka (@catsuka) December 4, 2019
His official page on CONNECTION agency website is now also offline.https://t.co/gTnvTpZ0qC
As his Instagram account.https://t.co/GkQ5dvNnAN pic.twitter.com/MinfaH7puw
.@thea_glad Friend of yours? https://t.co/XyLPG4oydA pic.twitter.com/dxlEKAtby9
— Thomas Weeden (@Thomas_Weeden) December 4, 2019
What do you think? Surely PlayStation didn’t knowingly lift animation from these other videos, right? Let us know in the comments, or hit me up directly on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk all things gaming!
The PlayStation 5, the latest and greatest PlayStation console, is set to launch Holidays 2020. You can check out all of our previous coverage of PlayStation right here.
