Top 10 Movies, Which Plagiarised Each Other

Sometimes, while you’re watching a movie, you get a strong feeling that you’ve seen this before somewhere but can’t just put a finger on it.

That might be because you have, sort of. There are so many movies being produced today that it’s become really hard to come up with something original. Sometimes, screenwriters just give up and plagiarize other movies and maybe change a thing or two. Join our plagiarism debate.

In this article, we’ll take a look at 10 movies which plagiarized other movies.

Disturbia

No 1 on our list is the 2007 detective movie starring Shia LaBeouf. It might come as a surprise to some but the movie was sued because of its suspicious similarities to a short story by Cornell Woolrich known as It Had To Be Murder released in 1942.

Both had almost the same plot with only a few minor plot details to separate the two.

A Fistful Of Dollars

This is yet another movie which ripped off a Japanese movie by Akira Kurosawa known as Yojimbo.

After Akira saw the movie, A Fist Full of Dollars, he immediately contacted the director saying it was his movie. He later received an out-of-court settlement.

Lilo and Stitch

While it wasn’t the whole movie that was a plagiarized version of another movie, a very important part of it was downright stolen.

The character Stitch was stolen from a comic from 1987 called Sam and Max by Steve Purcell.

Max was the character which Stitch was based on. Worse of all, it was done without the permission of Steve Purcell.

Ice age

Ice Age was a blockbuster animated movie from 2002 which made a whopping 43 million dollars on its opening weekend alone. Too bad none of it went to Ivy Silberstein.

The little squirrel who is always obsessed with a nut was actually based off a trademarked character by Ivy known as Sqrat. She pitched the character to Fox but was unsuccessful.

Imagine her surprise when she saw her own character in a movie she got nothing from.

Well played Fox, well played.

Titanic

The huge mega-blockbuster from 1997 is actually contains scenes that were blatantly ripped off from another familiar movie you might know as Aladdin (1992).

Several scenes actually contain identical lines and imagery from the cartoon.

No lawsuits were filed though.

Tango and Cash

The action-thriller featuring Sylvester “Rambo” Stallone and Kurt Russel was a shameless plagiarism of the movie Police Story starring Jackie Chan.

Both movies feature an extremely similar plot and scenes which were downright stolen from Police Story.

No wonder Stallone is sometimes called “Sly”. That was some sly handiwork right there.

Ted

Who doesn’t love the foul-mouthed, crack-smoking, adorable teddy bear from the movie Ted? Too bad he wasn’t original.

Ted is actually a rehashed character from a cartoon strip by Lucan Turnbloom known as Clovis the talking bear.

Both teddy bears are identical to the point of them being addicted to alcohol. It couldn’t be clearer.

Family Guy

You never would have guessed that Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin is actually a plagiarized character.

Years before Family Guy came to life, a character extremely similar to Stewie had already been existing in Chris Ware’s novels.

Simple case of stolen character right here. Whether Chris sued and got his share of the cake is unknown to me.

Batman (2008)

Yes. Even Batman is not above plagiarism. You might remember a scene from the movie where the lines: “This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object”.

That sounds like some original writing from the screenwriters. Except that something very similar was mentioned in the movie, Kickboxer 2 in 1991.

It seems we can’t even trust Batman anymore.

Back to the Future

This might not be considered plagiarism but it damn near foots the bill. A similar plot which is: a mad scientist constructs a breakfast-making machine to feel fulfilled, was first introduced in 1967 by a movie called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

You’ll notice that exact plot in the original Back to the Future movie. Although, several other movies such as Honey, I blew up the kids, The Wrong Trousers, etc. are guilty of the exact same thing.

This article was written by Edusson community.

Before Trump Can Wreck The Climate...

Image via Avaaz.org

Dear Avaazers everywhere,

In 67 days, President Trump could go to war with climate action.But governments are at their annual climate summit right now. If we act fast,​ we could get them to lock in progress before he can destroy everything we worked for.

Germany, China, India, Brazil, the climate vulnerable countries, and others are reasserting their commitment to the Paris climate deal. But if enough of us call for it we could get them to urgently lock in the way to zero climate pollution, demand the US keeps its Paris promise, and commit to advance faster towards climate solutions that Trump won't be able to stop.

Let's ask them to make an unequivocal statement for climate action, regardless of what Trump does. Avaaz has staff inside the summit -- let's make this the biggest public call ever to show we will fight like hell for everything we love -- it'll be delivered directly to governments.

Sign the Paris protection petition​,​ and​ share this with everyone!

Trump​ has called climate change a hoax, dismissed the Paris​ ​agreement, and just gave a climate denier with ties to Big Oil the job of determining his environmental policy in the next few months! 

But over 100 countries have signed up and Paris is already in force. Now the world's most vulnerable countries are leading the charge for urgent climate action. Yesterday, Germany announced a bold new plan to radically cut carbon and, crucially, China is shutting down coal and breaking records on renewable energy. India too. 

Trump could pull the US out of the UN climate convention when he comes to power -- and as the world’s largest per capita emitter, that will have huge impact not only on the people of the US, but on all of us. But such a withdrawal is a bureaucratic nightmare that could take years. If enough of us join together now with a roar of NO! we can find ways to stop it, and ensure the rest of the world speeds up if the US slows down. 

We simply can't let this ignorant billionaire destroy the only path to save our planet. Let's go all out now to keep the world on track when Trump takes office. 

Sign now to get our leaders to recommit to our planet and share this!

Together​,​ we helped make the landmark Paris climate agreement possible. We marched, donated, signed, and called. In the end, we helped push good leaders to be champions and made it difficult for anyone trying to block progress. Paris was always a starting point. We still have a long way to go to save everything we love from climate change. But if we lose it now, this shot at global cooperation is gone. This week we must act. 

With hope,

Loup Dargent
On behalf of Iain, Alice, Pascal, Risalat, Fatima, Ricken and the whole Avaaz team

Image via Avaaz.org

MORE INFORMATION:

• Paris climate deal thrown into uncertainty by US election result (The Guardian)
• Donald Trump Could Put Climate Change on Course for ‘Danger Zone’ (NYTimes)
• U.S. Leadership and the Historic Paris Agreement to Combat Climate Change (White House)

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How Brexit And Trump Will Affect James Bond

Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/EPA

By Klaus Dodds, Royal Holloway and Lisa Funnell, University of Oklahoma

James Bond will likely next grace cinema screens towards the end of 2018. Whether he will inhabit a filmic world in which the UK is no longer a member of the European Union and Donald Trump is the US president is yet to be seen – but if so, what a different world it will be. Bond’s mission is likely to involve the navigation of an increasingly porous Europe, vulnerable to malign influences from a resurgent Russia. The UK’s cyber-security defences face further challenges as industrial espionage and military and intelligence hacking intensifies. Bond is going to have his work cut out for him.

So it’s interesting to consider how these changes might effect Britain’s premier super-spy. As we explore in our new book, The Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond, Bond’s geographical mobility is pivotal to mission success. And however good he is, he needs allies and access to the resources that they are able to mobilise. Take away those “assets” and Bond’s agency is degraded. So do these tumultuous times – with the possible end of the Anglo-American special relationship and UK-European co-operation – also mean the end of Bond as we know it?

Since Bond is British, Brexit and the contemporary backlash against globalisation seem the most obvious things to consider. The ramifications of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the disillusionment with neo-liberal globalisation will certainly alter the way in which he is able to move and execute his secret missions in both subtle and not so subtle ways.

Brexit Bond
Brexit will certainly have an impact on his mobility. In most of the films featuring airports, including the earliest Dr No (1962), Bond is depicted as walking through them with brio, as a man untroubled by the “petty sovereigns” (as literary critic Judith Butler might have it) who administer and police airports. Travel could become more complicated for a post-Brexit Bond. His ability to glide through customs and border inspections airports and seaports would certainly diminish.

So new storylines might place further emphasis on Bond’s ability to circumvent conventional state controls and offer up further evidence of MI6 investing in multiple passports. As the Jason Bourne series suggested, an assassin needs, among other things, a decent selection of passports, including those of close allies such as Canada and New Zealand and adversaries such as Russia.

But M will likely have bigger concerns than passport problems, because the UK may suffer when it comes to cooperation with EU intelligence agencies. In Spectre (2015), we learned of the “Nine Eyes” intelligence network that included traditional working partners such as the United States and newer members like South Africa. But this network would likely be compromised in this emerging nationalistic world. European partners might react badly to Brexit and tell the UK to rely on the United States. Disillusionment with globalisation more generally might make partners less likely to share information and secrets – every state for itself could become the new rallying cry even for the closest of allies.

The ‘special relationship’
Working with the United States might be tricky, though. Recent Bond films have suggested a more ambivalent relationship with the former “special partner”. The CIA’s Felix Leiter was helpful in Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum of Solace (2008) but did not feature in the two most recent films. The warm relationship that Bond enjoyed with earlier incarnations of Leiter has long gone. In recent years, other spy films like M1-5 (2015) and Eye in the Sky (2015) have also raised concerns about the role, viability, and morality of British intelligence, particularly when collaborating with US military and intelligence agencies.

This sense of unease with the UK-US relationship is sure to only increase with Trump as president. He may prime his administration to insulate and isolate the United States from forms of globalisation that are antithetical America’s recovery to “greatness”. America (as represented through the CIA) may well not want to work with Bond/M16 and share its resources and intelligence as part of a new directive to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain. Leiter could be told in the future not to share intelligence with Bond because America needs to protect its interests first and foremost.

So in a world without the security of an Anglo-American connection in addition to the degradation of European partnerships, Bond’s role is likely to look very different. Will Bond still fight for global security or be repositioned more and more as a lone hero who fights for Britain and its safety in a post-globalised world? It might be too much to think that Bond could make Britain “great” again but he could help to stop a further “slide” down the international pecking order.

Goodbye Britain? Geoff Caddick/EPA

Bond’s Britain
And what might Brexit do to Bond’s relationship with the country itself? In Skyfall we see Bond’s ancestral home in Scotland and his retreat to his family estate is critical to luring the villainous Raoul Silva away from a chaos-ridden London. While M dies in Scotland, Bond’s return to London is foregrounded by his pose on top of a government building in the centre of the city. Large Union Jack flags are fluttering away on top of the structure while others serve as part of an official tribute to the late M.

Skyfall is overwhelmingly a celebration of a United Kingdom. Bond’s Anglo-Scottish heritage is integral to his movement from London to Scotland and back again. But given a divisive Brexit vote in June, might Bond’s identity shift and become a more English in the wake of Scotland’s overwhelming vote to remain in the European Union?

And if the process of Brexit proves troubling and time consuming as we expect, leading to heated discussions about parliamentary scrutiny, MI6 may be the victim of a blowback as parliamentarians seek to reclaim their authority from the executive. The late M was very vexed about such scrutiny; she patently did not care for it. Bond will have to hope that he and MI6 are still “trusted” and permitted to operate in the “shadows”, and allowed to do so in a world where nations find it harder than ever to trust each other, let alone the global political and economic system.


About Today Contributors 
Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway and Lisa Funnell, Assistant Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Oklahoma

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

Lego Vs Daily Mail Strikes At Paper's Weak Spot: Its Advertising Revenue

Image via Trumpton

By John Jewell, Cardiff University

Perhaps providing a welcome diversion to all the apocalyptic press reaction following the election of Donald Trump is the news that Lego, the Danish manufacturer of plastic bricks, has announced its intention to cease advertising in the Daily Mail.

Responding to tweets from social media campaign group, Stop Funding Hate (SFH), and a letter from a concerned parent on Facebook, Lego tweeted on Saturday: “We have finished the agreement with the Daily Mail and are not planning any future promotional activity with the newspaper.”

As veteran journalism blogger Liz Gerard writes, Lego’s actions may well be a game changer because in the midst of the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Lego’s decision there’s the possibility that other companies might follow suit and act upon Stop Funding Hate’s plea that they stop advertising in the Mail, Sun and Express over coverage of refugees and others that are deemed to be hateful and divisive.

The Co–op has been considering its position for some time. Its chief executive Richard Pennycook said in October that that the group is “looking at our advertising for next year to see whether we can align it more closely with our natural sources of support rather than more generic media advertising”.

And, as I write, John Lewis – a company which annually tries to make us believe Christmas exists solely as a vehicle for their latest campaign – is being heavily “brandjammed” by SFH and its army of social media followers. When the retailer recently released its Buster the Boxer ad, it quickly responded with a glossy pastiche video of its own which contained footage of previous John Lewis, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and M&S Christmas campaigns juxtaposed with the front pages of The Sun, Express and Mail.

The message is: the millions of pounds we spend at these stores is used to fund advertising in newspapers which peddle fear, hostility and hatred. To date the parody has had 6.1m Facebook views.

At the moment, though, John Lewis is currently resisting the growing pressure. It recently issued a statement claiming it “fully appreciates the strength of feeling on this issue but we never make an editorial judgement on a particular newspaper”. But there is no doubt that these negative associations will worry them, M&S and others a great deal. As the Guardian reported, John Lewis makes 20% of its annual sales – and 40% of its profits – over the Christmas period, profiting £8 for every £1 spent on advertising and the sense of its own worth is frankly staggering. As its ad strategists told Campaign, the ad industry’s trade publication:

Failing to engage the nation would have a significant commercial, social and cultural impact on the John Lewis brand.

War on hate
The fact is, Stop Funding Hate is gaining momentum and something which began as a Facebook page in August now has 176,000 likes and 58,000 Twitter followers.

Mail on migrants. Daily Mail

Perhaps more to the point, it enjoys the support of celebrities such as Lily Allen and Gary Lineker, who seem perpetually locked in their own war against the tabloids.
Its raison d'être is very simple – to take on what it sees as the divisive campaigns of the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express by persuading advertisers to pull their support. The campaign’s organiser, Richard Wilson, told the BBC:

It’s going to keep happening until the financial balance changes and if we can get to the point where actually you don’t make money by publishing these headlines, you lose money because advertisers are going to walk away.

Advertisers walking away is of course the major issue for the newspapers targeted by SFH. In a generally growing UK ad market, newspaper print ad revenue has been declining year-on-year and national daily newspapers as a whole suffered an 11% fall in ad spend in 2015 with tabloid titles seeing a 16.2% decline in print advertising.

It could be that the pressure finally tells. Remember that the closure of the News of the World in 2011 can be at least partially attributed to an online campaign and the fact that a host of companies including Virgin Media, Boots, O2 and Asda withdrew in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.

Undue influence?
There are broader questions, too. However distasteful one might find – as I do – the continued demonisation of refugees and asylum seekers by certain elements of the press, should any company’s advertising money have any bearing on newspaper content? Because the clear implication of the Lego decision is that they won’t return until something changes. Even if SFH argues that it is not asking advertisers to influence copy, a change in attitude will have to be the outcome if public pressure continued and Lego and any others who left the bandwagon were to confidently return.

Mail on judges. Daily Mail

On the other hand should we applaud the actions of SFH and its supporters? This is a movement creatively and effectively articulating the disgust felt by many people. It’s evident that left to their own devices and a toothless regulator, The Sun, Mail and Express will simply carry on as usual. What we are seeing now is consumer activism that is based, fundamentally, on a care and concern for fellow human beings. It might just have positive and far reaching results.

The fact is Lego listens to its customers and does have a record of corporate social responsibility. In 2014 it ended a partnership with Shell following lobbying by Greenpeace – and there are undoubtedly many who applaud their actions. Twitter and social media have been alive in the last few days with people spontaneously communicating support and (most crucially for company profits) their latest Lego purchase.

And there’s the rub – while the right-wing press cannot do without advertisers’ money, the likes of Lego can certainly get by without campaigns in the right-wing tabloid press and partnerships with the likes of the Daily Mail. And if sales of the little bricks increase too? Watch others follow as brands seek to limit damage by association.


About Today Contributor
John Jewell, Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

Arrival Review: First-Contact Film Finds New Way To Explore The 'Otherness' Of Aliens

Amy Adams and the weird pods. Paramount Pictures

By Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University

Spoiler alert: don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens

Denis Villeneuve’s alien movie Arrival, which has just reached cinemas, is the latest in a long sci-fi tradition of “first contact” narratives. Twelve seed-like pods appear across the world, causing a global crisis when they hatch, as world leaders argue over what to do about them. Is it better to strike pre-emptively before they destroy civilisation or risk trying to communicate with them in the hope they come in peace?

The challenge for Villeneuve and anyone in this genre is how to portray the “otherness” of these visitors. There’s little that hasn’t been done before, of course, from green men to insectoids to red blobs – frequently thinly disguised versions of invaders from the East. This often goes hand in hand with the America Saves the World narrative, Independence Day (1996) being one of the classic examples.

But if sci-fi has had its fair share of clumsy metaphors, it is hard to depict the truly alien when all stories come from human imagination – and hard to represent them without some reference to the human. As the researcher Sherryl Vint has put it, sci-fi must:

achieve the delicate balance of enough familiarity such that alien can be comprehensible to the human readers, but still incorporate enough alterity in the text such that the alien also pushes us to conceive of the world and ourselves otherwise.

How alien should an alien be?
Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland addressed this question of whether the human imagination can escape its own limits to imagine something unimaginably different. Not a conventional sci-fi story, it is about a character in a two-dimensional world whose reality is drastically challenged when he discovers there are three dimensions. Representing aliens is exactly that kind of problem.

Part of the challenge is that efforts to communicate otherness risk losing their effectiveness if they are overplayed. This is one reason sci-fi often doesn’t show the creatures until well into a film – Arrival being no exception.

Some of the most effective narratives avoid representing their aliens as much as possible. In HP Lovecraft tales like The Call of Cthulu (1928), cosmic horrors resist description: they are unspeakable and indescribable – and the imagination must fill in the gaps as best it can. Ridley Scott doesn’t go quite this far in Alien (1979), but understands that his creature is more frightening and convincing in partial glimpses – usually of its dripping jaws – than when shown in its entirety.

In Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s approach is to be careful in the representation of his aliens. The film’s characters barely use that word, tending to refer to them as “they”. The first glimpses suggest squid-like bodies, floating in a low-gravity mist. At first it is not clear whether these are entire bodies or the hands of something more giant – more complete views later in the film suggest something in between. The creatures are dubbed “heptapods” for their seven “feet”, though different feet have different purposes.

The language barrier
I’ve seen far worse representations of alien creatures, but where Arrival becomes really interesting in portraying otherness is in the language of the visitors. Other sci-fi efforts to communicate with aliens have ranged from universal translators like the ones in Star Trek; to the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; or a common lingua franca like Star Wars’s Basic.

In Arrival, the American authorities call on Louise Banks (Amy Adams), an academic linguistics expert, to come to Montana – mirrored by communication efforts by linguistics experts in other countries around the world. In Montana it becomes clear that unless Louise succeeds, the physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) can’t begin to answer his analytical questions about the creatures.

Their speech, if that’s what it is, consists of clicks and booms that are never deciphered. Understanding them depends on what is visible, particularly the inky circles of their written language. Unlike English words which describe spoken sounds, these circles are ideograms, symbols directly representing ideas or things. And when Louise and Ian observe that their grammar shows no markers of time direction, they begin to speculate that the creatures’ brains may be wired very differently to ours.

We later discover that the written circles are bound up with the creatures’ ability to see into the future, and that as Louise learns their language, she can see into the future, too. Villeneuve makes full use of film’s capacity to flash seamlessly forward and back - we do not at first realise that we are being shown the future instead of the past. It becomes clear that Louise’s life problems are unusually bound up with the Arrival event.

Louise greets the visitors. Paramount Pictures

Debate rages between governments about how to respond to the creatures, amid civil unrest and global tensions, with Russia and China particularly twitchy. Louise argues that the creatures may not know the difference between a weapon and a tool. As another character observes: if you only give someone a hammer, everything becomes a nail.

Ultimately, Arrival is less about communicating with the aliens than with each other – internationally but also individually. Louise’s gradual understanding of what it means to experience time like her alien acquaintances will be central to how she lives her future. The gift for her and the rest of the world is to a glimpse a distinctively different way of being.

The film’s message is that difference is not about body shape or colour but language, culture and ways of thinking. It’s not about erasing that difference but communicating through it. This is what achieves the balance of familiarity and otherness that alien films depend upon – and it’s what makes Arrival one of the more memorable contributions to the genre in recent years. And without entirely giving the ending away, it’s not the Americans that come up with the right way forward, but a more unexpected country.


About Today's Contributor
Emily Alder, Lecturer in Literature and Culture, Edinburgh Napier University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE Makes Its TV Debut; Airing Saturday, November 12th On Disney XD

(from left) Hovernyan, Nathaniel, Whisper and Nate - who have traveled back in time - are preparing to fight evil. (PRNewsFoto/LEVEL-5 abby Inc.)

YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE, the first English-language film based on the global phenomenon YO-KAI WATCH, will make its U.S. television debut on Saturday, November 12, LEVEL-5 abby Inc. announced today. 

The film, which recently received a limited theatrical run, features the voice talent of the hit show YO-KAI WATCH, currently airing its second season on Disney XD. YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE debuts at 9:00 AM ET/PT on Saturday, November 12 on Disney XD, and will have encore performances on Sunday, November 13 at 5:00 PM ET/PT and Monday, November 14 at 3:45 PM ET/PT.

YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE follows Nate Adams and his Yo-kai friends, Whisper and Jibanyan, as they're transported to the past to help Nate's grandfather, Nathaniel, battle evil Yo-kai and invent the Yo-kai Watch. YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE also introduces a new Yo-kai — Hovernyan, a floating blue cat who is Nathaniel's heroic companion. 

Cinema Blend calls the film "a fun and fast watch that makes for some entertaining excitement," and Anime News Network says YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE is "a funny and heartwarming comedy-adventure."

Nate and Hovernyan make for a formidable duo! (PRNewsFoto/LEVEL-5 abby Inc.)

To celebrate the film's TV debut, LEVEL-5 abby Inc. will make the second season of the YO-KAI WATCH animated series available for free on YouTube for a limited time. Starting with the first five episodes on Monday, November 14, episodes will be added throughout the month to the official YO-KAI WATCH YouTube channel, culminating on Wednesday, November 30. Each episode on the YouTube channel will also feature special QR codes that can be scanned into the best-selling new Nintendo 3DS games YO-KAI WATCH 2: Bony Spiritsand YO-KAI WATCH 2: Fleshy Souls, as well as codes for the iOS and Android apps YO-KAI WATCH Land™and YO-KAI WATCH Wibble Wobble™.

Fans will also be able to collect secret passwords hidden in each episode, which can be entered at the official YO-KAI WATCH website for a chance to enter a sweepstakes to win one of more than a thousand prizes, including exclusive Hovernyan "YO-MOTION" MEDALS. One grand prize winner will receive a prize package including, Nintendo 3DS games, Hasbro toys and a one-of-a-kind prize: a custom voice greeting from their favorite Yo-kai!  For more details on the sweepstakes, fans can visit the official YO-KAI WATCH website.

"We are thrilled that our amazing partners at Disney XD will be bringing YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE to television for all of our fans to enjoy," Yukari Hayakawa, Chief Operating Officer, LEVEL-5 abby Inc., said. "With the second season of the TV show, the best-selling new Nintendo 3DS games, our popular iOS and Android apps and now YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE, American YO-KAI WATCH fans have an entire world of hilarious, action-packed adventures to explore."

New episodes from the second season of YO-KAI WATCH are currently airing on Disney XD, every Saturday at 8:30 AM ET/PT. Immediately before the debut of YO-KAI WATCH: THE MOVIE on Saturday, November 12, the premiere of the new episode "Whisper's Secret Past" explores the secret origins of Nate's beloved Yo-kai butler for the very first time.

Enter a sweepstakes to win one of more than a thousand prizes, including exclusive Hovernyan "YO-MOTION" MEDALS! (PRNewsFoto/LEVEL-5 abby Inc.)

About YO-KAI WATCH

YO-KAI WATCH™ is a cross-media universe, following the hilarious misadventures of an average human boy and his involvement with the mischievous Yo-kai (invisible beings that are the cause of life's daily annoyances) all around him. Our young hero obtains a special watch, empowering him to discover and summon the mysterious Yo-kai, befriend them and then work together to solve everyday problems… problems that are often caused by other trouble-making Yo-kai! Discover the adventures of Nate and his Yo-kai companions via video game, animated comedy series, comics, toys and video on demand. 

View full episodes on the official YO-KAI WATCH YouTube channel and visit the official website, as well as follow YO-KAI WATCH on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

SOURCE: LEVEL-5 abby Inc.

The Movie Trailer:

The World Vs Donald Trump

Dear friends,

The unimaginable has happened. President Trump. 

And worse, there are Trumps in every town. Threatening all our democracies. 

What's most important now is to build a global movement to stop them. You and over 2 million Avaazers have signed the open letter, below, from the world to Trump, and it's been covered across major media. Now it's a manifesto for the next 4 years -- one that will run as a full page ad in major papers and project onto Trump Tower in New York. 

Help it become an even more powerful message by sharing it widely:

Dear Mr. Trump, 

This is not what greatness looks like. 

The world rejects your fear, hate-mongering, and bigotry. We reject your support for torture, your calls for murdering civilians, and your general encouragement of violence. We reject your denigration of women, Muslims, Mexicans, and millions of others who don’t look like you, talk like you, or pray to the same god as you. 

Facing your fear we choose compassion. Hearing your despair we choose hope. Seeing your ignorance we choose understanding. 

As citizens of the world, we stand united against your brand of division. 

Sincerely, 

ADD MY NAME

Sometimes in the darkest moments the brightest lights shine. Let's make Trump a force that brings the world together, to fight for everything we love. With hope,  Loup Dargent On behalf of Ricken, Alice, Emma, Christoph and the whole Avaaz team.  PS - Here's a letter with some more thoughts on the moment we're in, and the plan going forward: We wanted to write from the heart about what just happened in the US, and what's happening around the world. The shock is justified - the most powerful nation in the world will be led by a breathtakingly ignorant, bigoted, violent, pathologically lying, sexually predatory, vengeful, authoritarian, corrupt reality TV star. Those aren't insults, they're facts. How is democracy coming to this? How do we deal with it? We want to offer 5 points: Acceptance - we can't wisely change anything about the world or ourselves if we don't first accept it. So take a deep breath, and let's face it. President Trump. And Trumpism striving for power in many of our countries. Holistic Evaluation - I can't find a better phrase for this idea, but our brains have a deep negativity bias. We are easily overwhelmed by fearful focus on the negative, and we make awful judgments when we are. This is how demagogues rise. We can't let it happen to us. So looking at the situation holistically, here's some reassuring points: He's not all-powerful - The US President faces many checks and balances from Congress, the constitution, the courts, his own party, and foreign leaders. He was recently a liberal! - Trump is dangerous, but not a maniac. He has praised Hillary Clinton and donated to her campaigns and many of his positions are more reasonable when you scrutinize them. "Building a wall" is just saying he will physically police the US border. It's distasteful, but not crazy. Much of his party opposed him because he wasn't conservative enough! He's tapped into legitimate concerns - Trump's supporters are not simply a racist ignorant mob. Polls show at least half are people who are well aware of his faults but are desperate for change, hate Hillary Clinton, and are willing to gamble on him. The "people" are not with him - Trump lost the popular vote in the election (he just won through the US's quirky 'electoral college' system). So don't think this was a landslide. Focused Alarm - now that acceptance and holistic evaluation ensure we're not freaking out unproductively, let's focus our concern where it most needs to be: Climate Change- Trump says it's a hoax and wants to tear up the Paris climate agreement. Climate Change threatens our species and we're running out of time - but IF we can make sure that world leaders don't slow down, but speed up, the US alone can't destroy us. The rest of the world will drive a clean energy revolution that will make renewable energy much cheaper than fossil fuels - the US will be forced to switch by simple economics. Fascism - we just don't know what kind of leader Trump is. Is he a Berlusconi, the Trump-like Italian billionaire Prime Minister who was outrageously corrupt and ridiculous but not a fascist? Or is he a Mussolini? We will have to watch like hawks and respond fast to the tell-tale signs of eroding the rule of law, rigging the electoral system, intimidating the media, or promoting hatred of some minorities. Terrorism and War - Trump's instincts in the campaign were to call for things like murdering the families of suspected terrorists and introducing widespread torture. This direction is a gift to ISIS and will fuel the global conflict with militant Islam. His ideas are mostly illegal, but we'll have to watch closely and push back hard - domestically and through US allies - if this erratic man-child uses the US military brutally. It's the Media Stupid - Despite ALL evidence to the contrary, the American public overwhelmingly sees Hillary Clinton as MORE dishonest and corrupt than Donald Trump. This, by itself, is the reason why Trump is president. And it's the media's fault. US network news devoted more time to coverage of Clinton's totally BS email scandal than TO ALL POLICY ISSUES COMBINED. One the one side, we have ruthlessly sophisticated partisan propaganda media pushing Trump, and on the other an 'impartial' media that chases fake scandals and ratings and suggests false equivalence between the sides in the name of appearing balanced. This is the dynamic that gave us Brexit as well. We desperately need a smarter media. Very few organizations campaign on this, and Avaaz needs to. This is a HUGE opportunity, let's rise to it - change doesn't happen in a steady, linear way. We human beings learn best from crisis and calamity. Our brightest lights emerge from our deepest darknesses. World War II gave us human rights and the United Nations. And the darknesses of Trumpism could help us build the most inspiring movement for human unity and progress the world has EVER seen, to not only beat back the Trumps in each of our countries, but to do so with a new, people-centered, high-integrity, inspiring politics that brings massive improvement to the status quo. Let's get to work on it :). With hope, and apologies for the long memo, Ricken and the Avaaz team.

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