artemisio87:

rubitrightintomyeyes:

somethingclassysomethingvulgar:

rubitrightintomyeyes:

somethingclassysomethingvulgar:

tinkerlu:

Summerween Trickster and No-Face? I doubt it was an accident but I wonder if anyone else noticed? 

At what point is it not a ripoff? I demanded of my boyfriend as we watched the episode

I think it’s an homage and not a ripoff if one is a character from an academy award winning, internationally beloved animated film and the other is in a show on Disney Channel.  If you’re enough of an animation fan to be looking up who deserves credit for what, chances are you already know about Spirited Away.  And if you aren’t aware of Spirited Away, it’s just awesome that Studio Ghibli created a monster cool enough to reverberate past their own story.

I’m not saying gravity falls completely ripped off Spirited Away. I just am worried of at what point is it a homage and when it becomes a straight lifting of the character design itself. Then again, the big guardian of Gibli in America is Disney, who also owns, of course, Disney channel, and therefor Gravity Falls.
To be able to make an homage to something without getting sued requires a 25% difference between the source material and the interpretation, if you intend to make money off of the homage. I’m afraid that at that point the difference is less than 25%. And Disney sells their shows to be watched through cable companies, and makes a profit, therefor, on their show’s dangerously close reference to No Face.

I seriously don’t think the thought of suing would ever cross the minds of people at Ghibli anyway though??  Part of contributing to pop culture is putting your work out there to affect other people’s work and ideas.  When cartoons include a 300 foot reptile attacking a city (a la Reptar), I’m pretty sure folks don’t get litigious about anyone ripping off lifting a design from Godzilla.  There will never be any question which design came first, which design owes its inspiration to what.  Nobody in the animation industry will look at the Gravity Falls monster and say “wow what an original design!”  If it were originally a character design from an underground comic by an under-appreciated, starving artist then yeah, that would get into shady territory since a popular basic cable cartoon show would have the capacity to confuse who came up with what first.  That’s not the case here.

homage is a dangerous territory.
If you keep it down it sounds like stealing, but if you surround the character with other spirited away references it would be cheesy as hell.
In this specific case (as in, a new disney show referring to a classic of japanese animation) it’s clear it’s a heartfelt homage with no intention of cashing in to other people’s idea.
If they ever make a statue of this character with dipper on the bottom and sell it for $500, well, that will be another story :P but as it is now, i think if nothing else it will drive people to Spirited Away in the remote case they don’t know it already