To promote all their major holiday games, PlayStation Japan aired this commercial that doubles as a music video and it has a lot of really colourful, dynamic animation that looks spectacular. Too bad, it was completely copied from other animators.
Animator Oleg Kositsyn was the first to notice the painfully obvious similarities between the commercial and his original work. As the flood gates opened, it didn’t take long for netizens to identify other instances throughout the commercial that was lifted.
Animation website Catsuka has been chronicling the whole saga, putting together a Twitter thread which includes a side-by-side comparison between the original works and PlayStation’s commercial.
It was soon discovered that this was the work of Kevin Bao, a Chinese-Canadian animator based in Japan who is a director at Ealin Animation. Catsuka also uncovered previous work done by Bao that was plagiarised. In response to these allegations, Ealin Animation issued a statement on Twitter.
Bao has since been terminated and his work has been removed from all social media platforms. The video in question has also been removed on PlayStation Japan’s official pages.
Chelsea started playing video games at a young age and has since sunk deeper into the hole of geekdom. She dreams of one day studying pop culture for a living so she can watch Netflix all day in her pyjamas.
Sherry Toh
Trinity Sun
Ryan Michael Chin
