Slashdot Mirror
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."
I bet this will leave Disney red faced ;-)
the Communist version?
(really dating myself here)
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Does this say something about Buena Vista, Disney, the Japanese, or what?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I think Hayao Miyazaki didn't notice the problem with the red tint in his movie for obvious reasons. ;-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Japan vs. Disney: Spirited Away DVD lawsuit (articles,anime) (rejected)
:-)
You were forgetting that titles with "Strike Back" in them have always had a special meaning to nerds.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The article states: They claim that, after analyzing the DVD, they found that its color balance was biased towards red.
Anyone have any ideas how this happened? It doesn't seem like it's one of those things that "just happens". It sounds to me like someone in the DVD production group seriously goofed and it was missed by the QA team. If that's the case, it's a pretty amazing oversight... I'd love to hear the opinions of those who know more about video production than I.
That was in thousands of people -- 126,926 *thousand* people, or ~127 million people.
Disney had a similar problem with "Pocahontas" a few years ago, with thousands of Americans complaining about a "red tint" in the film.
These complaints stopped, however, when Disney admitted they were trying to portray "Native Americans". Consumers were simply mistaken -- the rest of the movie suggested they were Americans of European descent.
"Mother, should I run for President? Mother, should I trust the government?"
Apart from the other arguments, this suddenly reminded me of something I read when I was a kid. Apparently, according to the article, a lot of japanese have more sensitive eyes than most europeans (caucasian, white etc, this is not meant as a racist comment) and can detect subtle differences in hues of a colour that others don't. The article talked about japanese pearl divers being able to see subtle off-whites in the pearls and seperate them according to quality.
The point is: Are Disney's people in Japan mostly beefy white Americans? Is it possible that they literaly can't see the red tint in the DVD?
I've had a similar experience once when designing a website, and a guy from marketing kept wanting fucking wierd oranges and other strange hues until we discovered that he was colourblind.
My source disagrees. It looks more like 126 million... not thousand.
i have the region 2 (japanese) of spirited away--but it's still shrink-wrapped, so i can't give a first-person account :P nevertheless, here are plenty of firsthand accounts of the red tint.
on the same forum there is another thread reporting that the publisher of the korean release (dec 7) has announced that it will not have the red tint--although i'm not sure how that's been arranged. this seems to be a pretty severe acknowledgement of the red tint problem if the report is true.
Sample picture
I have no knowledge about the problem, just passing on the link I found. The effect is somewhat subtle from a single image, but I bet it's much worse when you watch the whole movie. Seems quite possible that the shirt on the right should be white.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
From the mail :
"(...) Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away)" is a digitally-animated movie produced by Studio Ghilbli, and its full-digital frames were designed and produced on computers. The coloration of the master for the DVD and VHS was strictly supervised/approved by Studio Ghibli's color designers and DP/Cinematographer.
The "Spirited Away" DVD/VHS was produced through an entirely novel procedure in mastering, and both Studio Ghibli and Buena Vista Home Entertainment Japan believe the quality of the DVD/VHS to be the best and the most faithful in terms of reproducing the original movie under the given circumstances.
As for the trailers on Disc 2, they have been included solely for the purpose of providing necessary information on the film, and because of this nature, it was not specifically color-corrected. Consequently, some differences in coloration may be detected between the same scene on the trailers on Disc 2 and the main feature on Disc 1. We assure the highest standard of quality control has been maintained on the manufacturing of both DVD and VHS, but differences in coloration may be detected depending on the type of equipment and/or the settings of the system being used.
That's their explanation at least.
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
Why are they asking for a replacement plus eighty dollars?
Has it caused them emotional and psychological distress to that degree?
Surely a replacement and legal expenses would be more reasonable...
You mean apart from the bit that says "both Studio Ghibli and Buena Vista Home Entertainment Japan believe the quality of the DVD/VHS to be the best and the most faithful in terms of reproducing the original movie under the given circumstances."?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
hell hath no fury like a thousand angry anime fans.
Gotcha.
Watch for my next story submission, "Playstation Bluetooth Tenchi DMCA Beowulf Strikes Back. Khaaaaaaaaaaaaan!"
from the now-you've-got-our-attention dept.
People with Brown eyes(on average) are less sensitive to flicker than people with blue or green eyes by about 5-10hz. (not sure about grey eyes).
The internet's a bit lacking on information, so here's some info on colour sensitivity...
Sensitivity to Color:
Different areas of human eyes have different sensitivity to color. For example, the eye is not sensitive to color at the periphery. It is only possible to discriminate between colors only +_60 of the straight head position. The color awareness range is about 90 to the straight head position. The eye is least sensitive to red, green, and yellow at the periphery. Thus when designing interface for large screen, blue would make a good background color.
The front of the eyes is more sensitive to red, green, and yellow. If we put small blue objects on the screen, which will usually be in the front of the eye, these objects will tend to disappear form the screen.
Discernment of color differences:
Eye is also least sensitive to changes in the shades of blue. It is very sensitive to changes in the shades of red. Eye is sensitive to the differences between colors in various degrees and the discernment of color differences is not uniform across the spectrum.
The eyes need to refocus for the colors, which are not near on the spectrum. Thus it would be difficult (tiring) for human eye to focus if red and blue are placed together.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
In other news the governemt of Japan was suprised to realize that they could fit their entire population into a single football stadium. ;)
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
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.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
The early CIE eye tristimulus models (the figures for spectral sensitivities of the eye's red, green, and blue detectors used in the CIE standard colour spaces) are still based on a very small sample of people. I beleve the first standards were based on only 17 people, all white, male Europeans. Even now, I think most standards are based on a sample of a little over four hundred people.
Why? Well, you cannot easily measure the tristimulus directly, so you have to get each of your subjects to match a lot of colours to characterise their eye's sensitivity over the whole spectrum. Then each person has a different yellow spot on their eye - the size and the density can vary quite a bit - so there is a fair amount of natural scatter. The case for natural tetrachromats claims the women's eye red response is bimodal, but when you see the tristimulus functions plotted out, it is really hard to see the evidence for it.
We do not have to rely on western figures. The Japanese had independently worked on colour science. The Ishihara who did the eye test patterns (he hand-painted the first ones using watercolours) did some measurements. But, again the populations measured were fairly small.
On the other hand, we know that the ability to remember and perceive colours is greatly affected by experience, and even the words used to describe colours. Tests on Bornean tribesmen that had separate words for yellowish-green (Wor) and bluish-green (Nol) were relatively better at remembering and distinguishing contrasts between these two colours then some other pairs of colours that the rest of us would find more easy. Now Japanese uses 'akai' for bright red paint, but also for skin colour (usually in connection with emotions), and brown shoe colour. Brown is usually 'chairo', which is 'tea-colour' but they also use 'kitsune-iro' (fox color) and 'tsuchi-iro' (earth-colour). If we are familiar with tomato red, brown, ochre, and brick red, we are bound to respond to colours and colour contrasts differently, but this does not mean we see them differently.
So, are Eastern and Western eyes different? The figures we have would suggest that you would not be able to identify the race of a person by their eye response - we are much more alike then we are different. If we measured a few tens of thousands of people, we might be able to drag some systematic difference out of the noise. But I don't think we could tell whether it was a genetic difference of a cultural difference, even then.
The pink cast on the DVD is much bigger than these differences. It's clearly an error. The suppliers ought to have offered a replacement DVD. Next time, they might. Give 'em hell, fellas, gambatte kudasai!
I don't know what happened and don't have the DVD but I've seent he original a few times.
Maybe it's a copy protection experiment.
Maybe it's a wierd attempt to (over)compensate for a phenomenon that is real in the still photo world - popualr images and the characteristics of print film make for much stronger red in U.S. film (e.g. Kodak especially when used in people shots) and much stronger blue in Japan.
Maybe it's a massive screwup (no kidding)
Maybe it's an attempt by Disney to hurt Ghibli (wouldn't put it past them)
Maybe it was made with a cutting edge "superior" technology that unfortunately looks like utter crap on most sets and nobody every tried it at home before going to print
At any rate those screenshots look like utter crap in comparison to the original film and what is considered reasonable in Japan.
The fact that our eyes can barely detect color in our peripherary vision is not common sense to most people.. we assume that we can see color in our peripherary because it "seems" that we retain that color information.
But try this: tell your friend to bring an object from the left or right of you, deep in your periphary vision, and tell him to move it up and down, and come less and less deep in your peripherary vision.. tell him to stop when you can see the movement out of the corner of your eye. I'm willing to bet that you can't tell what color it is (at this point I've had my brain fool me by thinking it's definitely one color, when it turns out to be somehting totatlly different).
Here is some screen shots. (in Japanese web page, but you don't need to read to see the picture ;-)
I saw one at my friend's house. It really looks terrible!
--- (The signature is intentionally left blank)
In anticipation of it getting Slashdotted, I have made available a reduced-size copy of a DVD screen capture that shows the reddish tint.
begin 644
The whole scene is skewed: R:141 G:119 B:63.
Worse is Haku's (boy on the right) shirt, supposed to be white: R:244 G:183 B:136
This looks like the white balance was pushed all the way to 6000K
Does that mean we can go ahead and sue WB for the faulty green tint on The Matrix DVD?
Whether you like Disney or not, you have to admit that for many decades they were a quality brand. This showed up in many ways. They have been far more punctilious than other studios about preserving their films (sure, it's paid off in endless re-releases, but it's still a "quality" move).
Richard Schickel, in "The Disney Version," says that even in the forties Disney kept a tight rein on Disney-character-merchandise licensees. Many parents have observed that--whether or not you think the stuff is any good, anything with Mickey Mouse on it has always been durable and well-made. (In the seventies when the kids were little the "word" was that "that Winnie-the-Pooh stuff (from Sears) wears like iron.")
The theme parks are, or used to be, so well maintained that after a day in one you started to ache for the sight of mashed chewing-gum or a candy wrapper. Perfect paint jobs on all the rides, painted scenery in the rides with dozens of subtle pastels like the background paintings in a classic Disney cartoon...
And the home videos were always of good quality, too. Not that you noticed it much--it's the sort of thing that you don't notice unless there's a problem.
This is very, very strange. It doesn't sound like Disney at all. They used to be very careful stewards of their brand.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Anyway, I had heard that there was a slight red tint before I got the disc, but HOLY COW was it noticeable. I don't buy for a second that it was intentional, for two reasons:
1) The "balanced for Plasma and LCD screens" excuse is bullshit. If Plasma and LCD screens displayed a different white balance or color gamut than CRTs, then no one would want them. I'm tempted to make an unaltered DVD-R of the film and take it over to the Fry's and try it out on their big Plasma TVs, but I know what the outcome would be.
2) The "we wanted a warmer look for the film" excuse doesn't fly, either. This is because even the Studio Ghibli logo at the beginning of the feature is way off. The other six Ghibli DVDs I have all have the same, pure blue Ghibli logo at the beginning. This one was more of a coral color; it's clearly a different color. After adjusting the color balance in the rest of the film back to Earth standards, surprise -- the logo looked normal.
So, in case anybody else is as much of a freak, here's how I corrected the color on my copy, using TMPGEnc:
Using TMPGEnc's "Custom Color Correction":
RGB Brightness (0, 28, 46)
RGB Contrast (0, 71, 134)
RGB Contrast 0 base (-10, 0, 0)
Basic Setting (0, 0, -10, 0, 0)
YUV Saturation (18)
That gets the picture very close to the original, as compared to the non-red-shifted trailer included on the Spirited Away DVD and Kiki's Delivery Service DVD.
Hey, there's another thought: maybe there's nothing wrong with the color -- maybe we're all just moving away from the TV really fast.
I wonder whether the lawsuit will do anything for non-Japanese residents...
I thought you were perhaps referring to the fact that Miyazaki was for a good deal of his life a Marxist. I'm surprised I have heard little mention of this... Any good biography will note how much of an influence communism had on Miyazaki's life.