Angry Spirited Away Fans Strike Back

peter_gzowski writes "Anime News Network is reporting that, 'The Japanese consumers in the Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures of Japan have filed a lawsuit against Walt Disney Japan over the red tint on the Japanese DVD release of Spirited Away.' Japanese consumers who purchased the Spirited Away DVD were very disappointed when they discovered a red tint to the film. A hundred thousand consumers complained, but Buena Vista Home Entertainment Japan (a subsidiary of Walt Disney) pretended nothing was wrong with the disc. The original source of news of the suit can be found (in Japanese) at Mainichi. No response from Disney yet."

Comments

Just to prove how red it is..

[oRiCN]

I took that screen shot that is floating around and just ran it through Photoshop 7's 'Auto Color' options and this is the result!

http://www.digitald.uk.com/storage/s-away-red.jpg

Lawsuits are Legitimate Free Market Actions

[underwhelm]

I think it's hilarious that the free market includes buying things and getting shafted, but not going to court to settle grievances. I hate to break it to the capitalist and pseudolibertarian free-trade lovers but anytime you sell something within the jurisdiction of a court, you may find yourself subject to a legitimate lawsuit.

To suggest that, merely by being producers in the market, businesses are exempt from answering for their torts disingenuously implies that they are somehow not a part of the social system within which they chose to do business. If a law was broken I see no reason a business shouldn't have to answer for it.

The market is one avenue for redress, indeed, but that's no reason to utterly deprecate legal remedies.

Re:Any indication of how this happened?

[Mononoke]

Quoting the stuff you quoted:

they used the newly mastered DVD/Video digital data in consideration with the fact that the DVD should be played on Liquid Crystal TV or Plasma TV

Bullshit. If there were special white balance considerations just for LCD or Plasma TVs, then everything else you would watch on those TVs would look wrong, because their white balance wasn't 'specially altered' for viewing on those devices.

If your CRT/LCD/etc. isn't calibrated to the same white point as the rest of the world, then everything but this DVD would look bad.

Disney just doesn't want to admit they fucked up. Again.