February 09, 2006

Co-opted By The Man

Ahem. Take a look at the commercial for the Anime Network below and tell me if you see something that looks familiar :

Here's a couple of screenshots from our non-profit political cartoon "Brother, Can You Spare A Job?" :



I should probably point out that the Anime Network's commercial is at odds with the Creative Commons license under which we released the short :



The point here isn't to lock down the rights to the short completely, but to ensure that our hard work is shown in the context in which we created it. Specifically, we didn't want Brother's message to get lost in the shuffle. That's why we've granted every request to repackage, exhibit, and present the short in full. It's been shown on television, film and animation festivals, video podcasts, DVD's, and worldwide screenings. And because our goal has always been to juxtapose a depression-era setting with the Bush Administration's elitist economic policies, we've never asked for a penny in return. So it's doubly insulting to not only have our work chopped up and reappropriated without permission or attribution, but that it's being done by some mega corporation that could easily afford to make a charitable contribution in exchange for the rights to re-use the footage.

I know I'm being petty here, but let me also say how much I'm annoyed that our work is being sqeezed into their strained "cartoons vs. anime" comparison as an example of animation that sucks. If you want to sell your infantile "robots, babes, and ninjas" crap to the masses, that's fine, but there's no reason to insult your fellow animators in the process. Since you drew a line in the sand, however, I gotta wonder where the works of animation geniuses like Isao Takahata, Osamu Tezuka, and Hayao Miyazaki would fit. They seem more like "cartoons" to me.

Posted by greg at 10:59 AM