Slashdot Mirror
Disney and Anime Plagiarism?
tenchiken asks: "Disney is at it again. A while ago they were accused of (ahem) lifting portions of Kimba for use in 'Lion King'. Now their newest movie, Atlantis has an amazing amount of similarity with GAINAX's classic Anime: 'Nadia, The Secret of Blue Waters'. Take a look at Ain't it Cool News's write up which has comparisons from the Anime point of view and of the Disney point of view. Details about the 'Lion King' and 'Kimba the White Lion' can be found here. Well, give Disney a little credit for The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, after all, those were original stories, right?" You know, I was looking at the ads for this movie just this week and I thought the exact same thing! While fiddling around on the web, I found
this comparison, and it appears that both pages are using information from
this Anime News Network feature.
Check out the above links as they may put the similarities (and any differences) into better perspective. So are the creative juices running dry over there in Disneyworld? Or is this just your average case of an earlier work's influence on a new release?
This just helps to expose how utter farcical it is to allow the copyrighting of ideas rather than words.
Yes, "Atlantis: The Lost Kingdom" is much like "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water". But as the article notes, "Nadia" in turn borrows a huge amount from Miyazaki's "Laputa". The idea for "Laputa" of course came from the eponymous magical island from Swift's "Gulliver's Travels."
But of course this masterwork of the übertroll Swift was really a satirical updating of More's "Utopia," which was a Renaissance answer to Plato's dialogues concerning ideal government, notably 'The Republic' as well as 'Timaeus,' where the parable of Atlantis is described for the first time in extant Western literature (albeit with attribution to Solon).
Copyright applied to ideas is really nothing but a sham. If anyone is getting ripped off here, it is either Plato or the supposed Atlanteans.
And to think I saw my first glimpse of 'Atlantis' and thought to myself, "Oh good, for once in their lives they are taking a _broader_ concept and writing their own damn story around that". Of course, this was before I saw the side-to-side story elements between that and Nadia. And the side-to-side _character_ designs between that and Nadia... *yeesh*
I don't know _where_ my brother turned this up years ago, but one reading of this small book will make your jaw drop, and answer questions you never thought to ask, like-
_Highly_ recommended...
This has little to do with creative juices. Disney is out to make money. In their animated work, the machine works like this: take a classic (aka 'proven') story, tweak it to their satisfaction, and release it under their own animation style and direction (and usually too much spontaneous breaking into song for my taste... ;-).
This process is so institutionalized it's even got a name: "Disneyficiation".
The fact that they've taken to poaching story concepts from much more recent manga and anime works is perhaps somewhat depressing, but no different in style than Snow White. They even did it to themselves: IMO, Fantasia 2000 was mostly a Disneyfied knock-off of the original!
Hmmmm. What song will the Death Rape machine sing? And will Elton John be the voice?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
That should be a laugh riot. . . .
props to all dead homiez
All of "Disney Classics" are just that-- classics that have been through Disney's machine.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Pinocchio? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? Aladdin? The Sword and the Stone? Brer Rabbit? Dumbo? Jungle Book? They're all classic folktales from various cultures. Disney never claimed to create the concept, just the adaptation you see under their banner.
That's why the official titles are Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or Disney's The Little Mermaid. Same goes for Disney's Atlantis. They're adaptations of classic stories.
With each new medium (voice, tablets, scrolls, books, silent movies, talkies, animated movies, modern cinema and now computer-rendered movies), classic stories are told and retold and re-retold with the new medium's strengths or with a new angle to keep it fresh.
There are some legitimate causes for complaint if a new work draws too substantially or too unoriginally from an older work; Lion King, Mononoke, and Atlantis may suffer from being on the borderline of this issue. But to say that Disney isn't putting something original or fresh into any of their adaptations of cultural classics is a big stretch.
This has been going on far longer than Disney's corporate life, so why piss on Disney's parade? Oh, yeah, this is slashdot, where groupthink and corporate bashing is the norm. Where selling an adaptation of a public-domain concept is considered evil. Get over it.
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There are no original stories. All stories, one way or another, are just retelling of all the basic myths of mankind.
For example, the Lion King was not ripped from Kimba, it was ripped from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Hamlet, like many of the bawdy bard's works, was just a retelling of assorted chunks of greek myths that he liked. The greek myths were old stories that had been handed down orally for centuries.
This kind of thing is basic stuff. Joseph Campbell taught it for decades (Exploration of Campbell's work inspired Star Wars, a popular Star Wars topic that is about as unoriginal as plots can be.). It was a PBS miniseries. Most high schools teach it as part of advanced freshman english classes. Any social anthropology teacher at any level will probably bring it up.
And of course, the idiots who run Slashdot, in an attempt to bring down the corporate machine, attack Disney for stealing plots for their movies, simply because they fail to realize that the plots of the Japenese animation they so often watch are no more original than they were when other people told the same stories a millenia ago.
Ok, when ripping a script, at least change the name of the main character more than one letter. You see, if i turned in a history paper that was ripped off the internet and i only changed the spelling of a few words, my teacher would not only turn me in for plagiarism, he would smack me in the head with my own stolen paper for blatant stupidity. Come on, people, if your gonna steal something, do it right.
I am !amused.
Yes, it is... for Disney.
The copyright holder for Nadia must show that protectable elements of the work were taken. The artwork isn't close enough to be infringing, and the plot elements listed on the oldcrows page (e.g., "the bad guys are interested in Atlantis so they can capture and use the power source") are far too vague to be protectable. Furthermore, the guy who authored the page has added a link to the following statement:
Furthermore, even if the holder of the Nadia copyright could somehow prove that Atlantis used protectable elements, all Disney has to show is that the authors of Atlantis were not exposed to Nadia. Constructive knowledge (i.e., "being in the animation business they should have known") isn't sufficient; they must have actually known about it, as copyright law (unlike patent law) doesn't protect against independent creation.
You appear to be right. From Burton's translation:
IT hath reached me, O King of the Age, that there dwelt in a city of the cities of China a man which was a tailor, withal a pauper, and he had one son, Aladdin hight.
http://mfx.dasburo.com/an/a_night_29.html
I'm having a bitch of a time trying to get the original French translation though.
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David also wrote two other interesting secrets of DisneyLand books: Mouse Tales: A Behind-The-Ears Look at Disneyland and More Mouse Tales : A Closer Peek Backstage at Disneyland
Interesting reading for both Disney fans and haters.
Given that, is it suprising that they want to make sure others don't do what they did -- take the work that came before them?
Will the copyright expire on any of the Mickey Mouse stuff?
Fight Spammers!
Or is this just your average case of an earlier work's influence on a new release?
Just your average case of MPAA hypocrisy, that's all.
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DOOR!!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Animation would be impossible if it weren't for plagiarism. The animation artists are all crooks. It's an inherent part of their process.
First, they start with a single drawing, a stil image known as a "cell". Then, they make another that looks almost exactly like it, only it's a little bit different. Then they do this again, and again, thousands and thousands of times.
Then, once their "movie" is completed, they show each of these images, each essentially a ripoff of the previous image, in sequence very quickly. By pulling this fast switcheroo, the audience is fooled into thinking that it sees a "motion picture" and not thousands of repeated images, each of which varies very little from the ones immediately preceeding it.
Yet in spite of the obvious similarity of one cell of animation to the one preceeding it, the masses just seem to love it. If only they knew the real goings-on behind the scenes.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Actually, Aladdin is not lifted from Arabian folklore - it's not Arabian at all. In the 19th century, there was a craze in Europe for all things Arabian, and translators could sell books by offering the largest collection of the "1001 Arabian Nights." A French translator, in an overzealous attempt to outdo his competitors, made up the Aladdin story to add to his collection. Of course, the story that sounded like it came from Arabic ouvre but still strangely appealed to Europeans (wonder how?) became the most popular.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
if you'd like more examples of disney badness, check out The Society of Disney Haters's website.
after spending some time on the SODH website, nothing disney does surprises me anymore.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
With a desire to see the plagarism, just about any story told can be accused of being heavily copied from an existing one - often without the script writers even being aware of the orginals existence. Take a look at the way, every time Spielberg makes a movie, several people sue him for stealing their ideas (kind of curious how he manages to keep copying the majority of his movie from several places at once).
The way things are going, I wonder how long it'll be before scriptwriting follows the original PC cloning and those working on it are kept in closed environments where the companies can prove they never saw anything from the outside?
Cough cough...
Who wrote Winnie the Pooh? Who wrote Peter Pan? Who wrote Alice in Wonderland? Who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, (and what is the proper title of the book)? How many kids these days are going to grow up thinking that these stories, and many others, were all written by Walt Disney? A. A. Milne, James Barrie, Lewis Carroll and Victor Hugo, (author of Notre Dame de Paris) probably turn in their graves every time one of these Disneyized corruptions of their work is screened. Whenever Disney gets it's hands on something you can count on a good deal of the story being changed, and any history corrupted. While many Hollywood productions seem to do this with any given novel turned screenplay, Disney films, for some reason, "redefines the standard", (where have we heard that term before?), and what is presented in the Disney film becomes the norm. For instance, the Seven Dwarves did not have names until the Disney flick, it's Disney's Pooh that kids picture, not the Ernest Shepard drawings. I realize that much of this can be put down as "artistic license", but consider that Disney is so big, so powerful, that many kids don't even realize that the books exist, let alone what the original plot was, or how old the book really is. Does that remind anybody of another huge monopolistic company that hates it when facts get in its way? Ahh, Disney! The Micro$oft of kidlit!
While this whole issue is of questionable relevance to "stuff that matters" I guess I have to admit that it matters enough for me to add my own thought. So here goes: to the question of "are all their creative juices dry?" I have to answer that this is not just a Disney problem - more a Hollywood problem. There seems to be an inherent inability in the California entertainment scene to create anything truly groundbreaking, or even thoughtful and interesting. Note that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was all over the Oscars, which have traditionally been a members-only Hollywood exhibition. Or the way the X-Files started to stink the moment production moved down from British Columbia to LA.
There seem to be two issues at hand, and they may be related. First of all, Hollywood is so revenue-driven that they must try to hit the least common denominator with everything they do, which excludes a lot of highly artistic content which might just be too niche-market for the bean counters who run the show to approve. This also leaves out a good deal of stuff that just seems too wierd for the apparantly wierd people who decide what gets produced.
The other issue surrounds the culture of Southern California itself - at great risk of generalizing here, I'd describe it as soulless. Everything there has a price value, and that value seems to be the only one that matters. This highlights the age-old battle between Northern and Southern California with the northerners constantly accusing the southerners of being thoughtless and greedy. The fact is, it may not be possible for someone wholly immersed in the SoCal culture ideal to actually come up with much of anything that isn't plasticy and over-glitzy to everyone else. I know people from LA will vehemently disagree with this, but my rebuttal is: where's the content? When the best movies and television (in terms of quality, not ratings) are being made anywhere but hollywood, what is the problem?
My biggest concern is that Hollywood seems to behave as though it should be the cultural center for the US, and considering the "role models" it proposes, this would be a very bad thing indeed.
Insert flames here:
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I got my wish. Walter Eugene Disney wandered in about four o'clock and his first words to me were... "where are your parents?" When I'd assured him that I was not an orphan and well looked after, he wanted to know if I was having fun. I could hardly speak, I was so happy. He wished me and my family well, and then left. I still don't know for sure if the rumors about his loft above the firehouse was true or not. I didn't care... I'd got to say "hello" to Walt.
Fast forward fifty years. Michael Eisner makes more money in a year than Walt did in a lifetime. Disney, BuenaVista, and their subsidiaries routinely make movies that feature nudity, foul language, and violence. Disney gets sued over underwear. Disney gets sued over wages and benefits. Disney announces layoffs just to perk up the stockholders. Disney is no longer a kindly old grandfatherly type that wants to know where your parents are; Disney is now just another faceless megalithic corporation that just wants to know where your money is.
As an aside, did you know why Annette Funicello never wore a bikini in any of her beach movies? Yup, Walt. He thought it would make a bad impression on youngsters if a former Mouseketeer showed too much skin. He held her to a contract provision for the rest of her career just because his sense of moral obligation made him sure that that was the right thing to do.
If there is an afterlife, I feel sorry for Walt, looking down on what has become of his dreams for family oriented entertainment and family values.
That wonderful day in the firehouse is gone forever.
Hmm ... you've obviously only watched a small selection of anime.
... there are as many and varied storylines as there are in US live-action movies ... in fact, usually more. Yes, there are a lot of anime shows which follow a formula, but there are many which also step outside the normal bounds. Take for example the superb "Jin-Roh", a metaphorical and at times literal retelling of the classic faerie tale "Red Riding Hood". Or the incredible story of Nausicaa (in particular, the manga - the movie does not have the same depth).
I would invite you to contrast the artwork and character designs of "Magic Knight Rayearth" (by CLAMP) and "Kiki's Delivery Service" (by Hayao Miyazaki). Or Harlock Saga (by Leiji Matsumoto). Shirow's hard-eyed Deunan (from Appleseed) is another character design which breaks the mould.
Indeed, the very topic involves a show (Nadia) which breaks the standard "big-eyed" character design of anime - it is based more on the character designs of Hayao Miyazaki.
As for storylines being all the same
Getting to the original topic, I cannot believe that the writers and artists involved with Atlantis were completely unaware of Nadia. I have no problems accepting that many of their ideas came from the works of Jules Verne and other sources. It's just that those "other sources" have to have included Nadia for there to be so many similarities. It's far beyond coincidence.