Animated Playstation ad vanishes after plagiarism claims

A video promoting new Playstation games has disappeared from the web after fans noticed that its hand-drawn segues were nearly identical to scenes in other animated works. The swipes are unusually brazen, featuring not just individual frames or designs but entire sequences lifted from productions as widely-seen as Stephen Universe: The Movie.

Here’s an unofficial upload, which may not stay live long:

Only the style changed, to match the rough, colorful aesthetic of one Kevin Bao, a Tokyo-based animator whose social media accounts and professional pages were locked today.

Journalist Marc Aguesse, operator of the French animation website Catsuka, exposed the similaries in a series of videos. He credited Ian Jones-Quarterly, Carlo Monserrat, Oleg Kositsyn and Eduardo Adsuara—all professional or student animators—for “spotting the first rips.”

Homages to iconic moments in animation history are commonplace–how many times have you seen a motorcycle skid sideways to a halt?–but the uncredited tracing of recent (and in some cases amateur work) in official Sony material is another thing entirely.