'Perfect Blue' and 'Requiem for a Dream'
animationobsessive.substack.com
animationobsessive.substack.com
People take shots from other films all the time. The only weird thing about this is how close the two films were chronologically. Usually people steal from older films. But this is far from a big deal. Tarantino has talked about how Reservoir Dogs is basically a segment of one of his favourite Honk Kong films made into a whole feature. This is literally the way a lot of films get made, people are inspired, sometimes they see a scene that's quite tough or they can't quite crack it so they take from some other film. Doesn't mean they're hacks.
[EDIT] Incidentally, when later Star Wars media gets this fundamental aspect of Star Wars and leans into it, is when it's at its best IMO. You could practically play "spot the rip-off" with The Mandalorian, it borrowed so heavily from other film and TV—and, though perhaps overrated, it's certainly one of the best Star Wars things since the original trilogy. The Last Jedi stood out to me among the Disney-era films for doing a lot more cribbing from sources of the kind that Star Wars used, rather than cribbing just from... Star Wars itself (though it also did that, heavily re-mixing Empire, especially).
It's not higher up because I think they botched the execution pretty badly (though not entirely! Parts of the movie are quite good!) but the core idea is excellent and is exactly the sort of thing that should be done with the Star Wars IP. The space fight at the end also holds the distinction of being the only one outside the original trilogy that's given me a hard-to-define "Star Wars feeling" that I associate with the original movies (a few of the video games have achieved it, but none of the other films since ROTJ, for me personally, anyway).
I know the feeling you are talking about; the pod-racing scene in TPM gave me that feeling as well. There is so much to hate about TPM, but it's (IMO) the least-bad of the prequels, and by a fairly large degree.
Episode I is the best of the prequels by a long shot, even though it's not very good. II's definitely the worst of them, though (maybe the worst overall? I dunno, Ep. IX might be even more broken on a technical level than II is, but it managed to fall into a "so bad it's... not good, but entertaining" sweet spot for me where at least I could laugh at it, while II is both badly-made and painfully boring), so at least I didn't get tricked back into the theater for another failure of quite that level.
Episodes I and VII are the two I'd put in their own special category, recommendation-wise. Like, if you've watched IV, V, VI, VIII (maybe skip it I guess since it's the middle of a trilogy? That one's hard to recommend just because of that, especially with IX being so very bad) and Rogue One, and are truly desperate for some more Star Wars, consider those. One's fairly bad and the other's a typical irritatingly-lazily-written Abrams script (do let him cast, direct, and punch up dialog, he's excellent at all of those, masterful at times, even—do not let him touch plotting), but they're by far the best of the lesser set of the films in the franchise IMO.
And I agree. All art is copied to begin with, it just depends on how much of yourself you put into your version. If it's a lot, then it will appear quite original.
The power imbalance in creative copyright is real.
Everything I've read about artists I respect seems to involve them falling in love with another artists work and aping it when they are young.
Even once they get famous, I find originality has more to do with where they get their inspiration than what they put into it themselves.
I love tracing the roots of the things I love. It's endlessly rewarding. And now I'm going to watch this anime.
One of my favourite words is "scenius", the genius of a collective artistic scene. This necessarily implies 'copying' and mutual inspiration.
And I think the same applies to software. I'm generally more excited about something that is the next step in an evolution, than something that pretends it's entirely new.
> I find originality has more to do with where they get their inspiration than what they put into it themselves.
I'm not sure I understand how you're separating a person's inspiration from who they are. If I'm inspired by something, it's because it talks to me as a person. If the person then creates something, how have I not put the inspiration (myself) into it. They are one and the same to me.
But if someone takes random musical thing that's been happening for centuries in a folk tradition or something that weird Avant guard artists are doing and turns it into pop culture, that'll often be seen as 'original' in the first sense as it is new to most viewers when it's not original in the second sense.
"Rapper's Delight" by Sugarhill Gang is a good example, it's both original (first hip hop record success) and totally ripped off at the same time, while also being really good.
Satoshi Kon died before the release of Black Swan. He has no opinion on it.
> Aronofsky bought the rights to “Perfect Blue” to use one of its scenes for his “Requiem for a Dream” (2000)
which TFA actively denies.
It's actually puzzling how Aronofsky went back to Perfect Blue, after being caught effectively plagiarising it once already and likely knowing that Kon, beyond the formal politeness typical of the Japanese, wasn't really happy about it. It's like he was daring to be sued.
Both directors don't come out of this particularly well - Kon for being a frustrated but ultimately weak character, Aronofsky for achieving success with fundamentally plagiarized work.
Painting portray the same subject, or use the same lightning or the same composition or be a comment on the same theme endlessly. Music, books, movies, products, they will always be a product of imagination + previous experience, and that's perfectly human, and good. The artificial limitation on this sometimes inspire great stuff, and other times, the opposite.
Requiem for a Dream isn’t Perfect Blue. But it does treat its ideas as fair game.
But when a film takes lots and lots of shots and motifs from one single other film, there's a point at which it stops being a homage and becomes plagiarism.
It's been years since I've seen either of these films - although I remember Perfect Blue having a huge impact on me around age 20 - so I don't have an opinion on whether plagiarism happened here or not. Certainly the author of this article wants us to believe it did but I didn't find the article convincing one way or another.
I also wonder how common it is, and what's considered to be an acceptable level in the film industry - are there hard and fast rules about what constitutes plagiarism, like there is in academic writing? Or is there an acceptable level in the US that's different to Japan, perhaps?
Or more simply, suing cross-countries in such a complicated field as copyright, is extremely hard. In many cases, tbf, this goes both ways - which is why the US is always very keen to "harmonize" copyright laws whenever they are discussing trade deals. But the imbalance in economic resources typically means richer players in the US have a degree of recourse that non-US players will almost never get.
Imbalance between the US and Japan? Remember this happened in the year 2000. Look up which of the two countries had higher per capita GDP back then.
In any case, it doesn't seem like anyone is suggesting this was plagiarism at a level that could be sued over - it's not a case like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly which was a shot for shot copy. I was more thinking about ideas of honor in Japan vs the US and how that might affect the respective outlook of the two directors.
> I was more thinking about ideas of honor in Japan vs the US
I don't think there is any particular stigma with the concept of suing for plagiarism in Japan, or any higher tolerance for copying, at least since the '90s (in the '80s and earlier, their mindset was definitely different - more similar to modern Chinese attitudes for which ripping off is just a fact of life; but newer generations are less hungry and hence less unscrupolous).
Some months later, she evened the score with American Psycho, so it netted out. I remember people talking about Perfect Blue, but anime wasn't my thing other than Ghost in the Shell being part of the 90s hipster/geek crossover canon.
Speaking of having a little too much homage, an old anime I like (mostly nostalgia) is Bubblegum Crisis and it has direct rip-offs from Blade Runner and Streets of Fire.
In music you often get people sampling a song due to percussion or production and the lyricist or just some random dude getting paid.
I've read a couple things over the years that the win for The Departed is a sort of make-up from the Academy for Scorsese losing Best Director for Raging Bull in '81 to Robert Redford (for "Ordinary People", who remembers that?) and for Goodfellas in '91 to Kevin Costner (for "Dances with Wolves", who WANTS to remember that?)
Goodfellas vs Dances With Wolves: A tie. Sorry, there really are people who really liked Dances With Wolves. I myself saw it again after over 20 years recently, and it's still great in my older age. Most of the criticism I've seen of it is flawed. From an artistic standpoint, it beats Goodfellas hands down - but Goodfellas is much more entertaining.
Raging Bull is a cinematic masterpiece. As "art as art" it is sublime. It is a love letter to film.
Ordinary People is an emotional masterpiece. As "art as therapy" it is sublime. It is a love letter to humanity.
When people "steal" from Raging Bull it's fairly obvious and usually surface level.
Plenty of people stole from Ordinary People, too, it's just harder to spot because what they stole is more psychological and subtextual.
Just as a simple example, the most iconic televison show of the last 30 years (The Simpsons) cribbed way more from Ordinary People than Raging Bull.
If you look, it's easy to spot the influence throughout the series' run. But there's no single iconic shot like their Raging Bull slo-mo homage in "The Homer They Fall."
What does it even mean, to remember, to steal, art...?
What is Infernal Affairs a shot-for-shot remake of?
Pi clears this bar easily. Sure, shooting 16mm off the hand, with oversaturated, Expressionist lighting, and some of the body horror (or did they both "rip off" Cronenberg there?) approaches homage. If one has seen Tetsuo first, there's more to appreciate.
But Pi is an excellent movie, which carries its own themes gracefully, Aronofsky made his reputation on that film and deserved to. The soundtrack was also groundbreaking.
If we were to adopt your idea of what constitutes a ripoff, the result would be more bland and defensive cinema, the kind where the script may as well have been written by the studio's attorneys.
So let's not.
But I'd note that whenever someone points out that X copied Y, we can always go deeper and find out that they both really copied Z, who copied A, ...
There's no such thing as original art.
Everything is a copy.
Or nothings a copy. Maybe. Either way I'm with you. And I'm looking forward to watching Tetsuo Iron Man.
If you haven't seen it, I recommend seeing 'Millennium Actress' and/or 'Paprika' first, and then if you love the style, watch 'Perfect Blue'.
'Tokyo Godfathers' (which is not at all what you'd expect from the title... it's about three homeless men who find a baby) is also very good too.
I also recommend Kon's work.
I'm pretty sure without Walt Disney, there would have never been any Anime in Japan.
But there's the difference: Tezuka was, as the moniker makes obvious, hugely successful, also financially. It's easy to be gracious to people copying from you when you're successful yourself.
It's a very different thing when you're struggling and other people are being successful and making bank with ideas copied from you - and that is clearly what irked Satoshi Kon as well.
The first commercial animation in Japan pre-dates Disney by a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime
Anime is effectively an offshoot of manga, which goes back literally centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_manga