Early today, Twitter was flooded with outrage over the latest PlayStation promotional video, which initially released on November 29th. What’s presented as a colorful, musical affair showing off footage from new games such as the upcoming Final Fantasy IIV remake, Death Stranding, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Nioh 2, and many others, is broken up by a series of animations that have been traced over from sources ranging from huge recent releases to independent student projects. French animation website Catsuka took the time to compile all of the violations and contrast them against the PS4 Lineup segments…
Latest Sony PS4 Lineup Music Video is a rip of many animations from all around the world ……
(Steven Universe, FLCL, Gobelins, Souviens Ten-Zan …).
The video is now offline : https://t.co/LPWyFWzEEw
But you can still find it online : https://t.co/KfS79oRrs5 pic.twitter.com/6Q0hrFK2AT— Catsuka (@catsuka) December 4, 2019
The resemblances are far from homage and are far, far too on point to be anything other than tracing. Stolen assets come from places like the Steven Universe The Movie (2001) and FLCL (2000), but a good number of ripped content has been identified as original animations done by independent names such as Oleg Kositsyn, Thea Glad, and Charles Vansard — all of which are linked here, having received no credit nor compensation. Several examples come from the Paris animation school Gobelins.
https://twitter.com/brdbrwthbeer/status/1201495995156193286?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1201495995156193286&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eurogamer.net%2Farticles%2F2019-12-04-sony-pulls-playstation-4-lineup-music-video-accused-of-ripping-animations
According to website DualShockers, a Japanese article identifies the animation director as Kevin Bao, who has actually been accused of plagiarism before. At time of writing, Bao’s CONNECTION agency profile and Instagram account have both been deactivated.
https://twitter.com/KristianDuffy/status/1202180739976089602
Kevin Bao has previously received awards from Ottawa International Animation Festival as well as London International Animation Festival. At the time of writing, Bao’s profile with the creative agency Eallin (who has offices in London, Prague, and Tokyo) was still active, but once revisited all of 5 minutes later, this has also been removed. Sony has since pulled the PS4 Lineup promo from social medias, however (clearly) the evidence remains.
