Eagle-Eyed Twitter Users Slam PlayStation Japan for Art Theft

• PlayStation Japan recently released a promotional music video.
• Users on Twitter noticed several cases of completely traced artwork.
• Theft has occurred from FLCL, Steven Universe and independent animators.

PlayStation love to make promo videos, just like any company really. These videos allow a creative team to express themselves, and it’s a good way of showing off your lineup. The recent It’s Time to Play promo springs to mind, especially considering the supposed Crash leaks involved. As it turns out, PlayStation Japan also loves to put out promos.

The Japanese branch recently created a promo to advertise their lineup, in the form of an animated music video. That wouldn’t normally be anything to write home about, but it appears that they may have stolen a lot of animation for it…oh dear.

PlayStation Japan Was Caught Red-Handed

The theft was discovered by eagle-eyed Twitter users who thought there was something familiar about some of the animation sequences. One of the first sequences that got noticed was actually stolen from animator Oleg Kositsyn. The animation in question was taken from Kositsyn’s graduate work, a fake trailer in particular.

The fact that they stole work from a relatively small animator is bad enough, but that’s the tip of the ice burg. Further sequences were stolen from more mainstream sources. At least one sequence was copied from Steven Universe: The Movie and another from the popular anime series FLCL.

It could be argued that this is just a ‘homage’, but that’s a little hard to swallow in this case. A frame-by-frame comparison was uploaded to Imgur and it looks like a total trace job. Seems like someone at PlayStation Japan couldn’t be bothered to come up with their own animation.

They May Have Admitted Guilt

While there hasn’t been an official statement yet, PlayStation Japan still looks pretty guilty. Apart from the fact that side-by-side comparisons show many marked similarities, they’ve gone and made the original promo video private.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped Twitter exploding with the news. More and more examples of theft have been uncovered so far. PlayStation Japan may have even stolen their entire promotional video by the look of things.

There are a certain number of people defending the thefts by saying that Steven Universe borrows shots from anime all the time. The difference really is that while Steven Universe will redraw a shot, this music video appears to have literally traced over the work of other artists without credit at all.

No matter what happens, it looks like PlayStation Japan is in hot water.