Homage or Rip-off?

“Homage or Rip-off” should be a new category on Cartoon Brew. Certainly we have enough material. In the comments of the Lee Lennox’s “Girl and the Sea” music video, which was a homage/ripoff of Yuri Norstein’s work, Brew reader Doug posted a link to this new commercial for GE. The commercial is more than a little inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s short film Jumping (1984), and unlike Lennox’s video, it doesn’t build on the original concept or offer any new perspective on the material. The commercial is part of GE’s fittingly ironic campaign called “Imagination at Work.”

Below is Tezuka’s original (and much more creatively executed) short Jumping.