PlayStation Japan recently released a, nearly five minute, music video featuring cinematics and gameplay from many of their latest games. This wouldn’t be a problem, ordinarily, but they interspersed the game footage with animation copied directly from a variety of sources, including Steven Universe: The Movie.
How bad could it possibly be? You might be wondering. Well, here’s the original video (which Sony has since removed from their official YouTube page):
https://youtu.be/6P3I1Re7KMQ
So. Long.
And here’s a side-by-side comparison of all the plagiarised bits:
https://youtu.be/IW_f-SAN3ZY
The animation director apparently responsible, Kevin Bao, has been fired, and purged from the Internet, after animators from around the world (some of which are animation students or from small, independent studios) began posting examples of the plagiarism on Twitter.
It’s difficult to put all the blame on Sony for this one, since it’s unlikely that whatever marketing exec okayed the video had enough knowledge of animation to tell that it was copied. They also took the video down as soon as they found out about the plagiarism. You can definitely blame Bao, though, and whatever animation studio he was working with at the time.
Via Kotaku.