Wait, is this Bruce Lee anime his family’s making some kind of weird NFT thing?
Digging into the financials for House Of Lee raises a lot of weird, crypto-adjacent questions
Aux News Bruce Lee
For a couple of days now, we’ve been seeing a trailer floating around online for “House Of Lee,” a new anime project created and endorsed by Lee’s daughter Shannon, and the Bruce Lee Estate. The teaser itself is short, but undeniably snazzy: Shots of Lee—animated in a more old-school style of anime art, with lots of obvious manga touches—throwing punches, flowing like water, and, uh, turning into a dragon. (The synopsis for the series makes it clear that it’s going to be some kind of fantasy story, rather than anything more biographical like 1993's Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.) The film grain effect helps sell the illusion that this is the kind of animation you could have caught decades ago on some late night on cable, or via an imported VHS.
As we dug into the details on the project, though, we had to ask ourselves a question that’s been blissfully absent from the cultural conversation for a minute. I.e.: Is this some kind of weird NFT thing?
Bear with us for a second here. The credited animator on the trailer is Emily Yang, who’s best known in crypto and web3 circles as plppleasr, a massively successful (and undeniably talented, from the work we’ve seen) artist who made a name for herself with some high-profile sales of art that caught the market’s attention a few years back. Among other things, Yang used her success creating NFT art that didn’t look like a crew of infinite monkeys banging on a typewriter that can only spell “FUCK YOU, DAD” to launch a new platform called Shibuya last year, producing a short pilot for a show called White Rabbit, where users could buy NFT “producer credits” to vote on a branching story.
Now, Shibuya is also the listed producer on the House Of Lee trailer—although the actual animation was handled by Chinese studio Shockunit, whose animation reel is filled, surprise surprise, with NFT-based stuff. Anyway, Shibuya bills itself as, among other things, a crowdfunding platform—which it primarily does through, as far as we can tell, the minting and selling of NFTs.
This didn’t generate much notice at the time outside of crypto circles, but that’s exactly what House Of Lee did back in April, minting a token called “House Of Lee: Genesis” that promised buyers “This is your ticket to the House Of Lee.” Shibuya’s site says it minted 49,000 such tokens, at a listed mint price of roughly $15 a pop, suggesting that they should (assuming stable prices for the blockchain-based currency Ethereum) have netted a bit more than $700,000 for their efforts. (The value on the token has gone down now, by the way; it’s trading at between $6 and $10, depending on which marketplace you look at—such is the price of a ticket to the House Of Lee.)
Veering back toward the point: None of this has been mentioned in any of the promo materials going around right now for House Of Lee, which is set to run its trailer ahead of a 50th anniversary re-release of Enter The Dragon later this month. (Deadline’s article on the trailer, for instance, notes only that the independent project was funded “Through a community campaign,” while featuring a statement from Shannon Lee praising Yang and Shibuya as “perfect collaborators.”)
Nobody’s faulting Shannon Lee and the Lee estate for looking into non-studio ways to finance a project like this—which, again, looks pretty cool. (And there’s no indication, as of yet, that the project itself will incorporate NFT or blockchain elements into itself, behind the initial funding push.) But NFTs remain highly controversial and volatile in the minds of a lot of people, making them the sort of thing folks would probably like to know they’re getting involved in, before throwing their support behind a project built on the name of a legendary icon.
17 Comments
NFTs? What is this, 2019?
Between this and the Lil Tay crypto scam, I’m assuming the back half of 2023 is just all these stupid grifts coming back to the forefront of public consciousness. For…reasons? Maybe to herald Trump running again? “Hey finance nerds, remember POGs? Well don’t let the Biden Crime Family get you down, they’re back and better than ever!”.
I think if you’re of a certain bent – kinda online, see these things in your feeds, and are familiar with current pop-culture and tech in general – you’d have seen that NFTs done, but if you’re an older, big business type you might only just be hearing about them and not realising they’ve peaked – in fact, you might assume they’ve become commonplace, established means of genuine investment and not just beanie-babies for techbros.
I hope not, I already fucked that year up!
We fucking told you not to eating that pangolin.
And I told you not to kink shame!
White Rabbit is yet another case of cryptobros* desperately looking for some use – any actually useful use – for NFTs other than ‘pure speculation’ and settling on a solution that’s already done better and easier without them. Like in this case ‘only the $10/mo and up members of my Patreon get to vote on the plot’ (which is, separately, just a terrible idea).* Yes, there are some female cryptobros. The ‘bro’ bit is so integral I haven’t heard a better scornful gender inclusive term yet.
Having your audience vote on your creative decisions is a fantastic way to get them deeply emotionally invested whilst inevitably setting them up for disappointment and absolute spittle-flecked rage directed at you for not giving them exactly what they expected.
So is having any sort of commercial art.
Right, I don’t get why the NFT aspect is involved in the crowdfunding other than to shoehorn it in. There are other easier, less convoluted ways to crowdfund, up to and including just asking for money.Is the idea that these “tokens” might actually be worth something, so your “buy in” will potentially earn money in the future?
This style kind of reminds me of Fist Of The North Star. Which is appropriate I guess given that they tend to punch holes through people’s torso and Bruce Lee had a 1 inch punch?I saw another article (possibly on here as well about this House Of Lee but there was no mention of any NFT shenanigans…
There is NO “film grain” in this trailer. There is a “film dirt” effect in a few bits, but even at 1080p on a blown up on a 4K monitor, there is no grain in these images. At all.
Film grain looks like very fine color noise when actual analog film is scanned to digital. I spent the better part of the 90’s making sure that, among other things, CG elements had film grain added to them to make sure they blended as well as possible with the original photographic plate. It made a huge difference at the time.
But it IS a cool looking trailer.
Look, you can’t possibly expect the A.V. Club to use accurate terminology to describe media with a visual component. It’s more about how words make you feel around here.
I miss when they paid actual writers who knew what the fuck they were talking about…
I’m impressed you made it to the article; I’m still trying to parse the headline.
Turns out you can be a talented artist and still fall for Herbalife or Amway or whatever the latest scam is. Who knew?
People been milking money out of Bruce Lee for years. An entire movie genre was based around making money from people’s fascination with the guy.Dude was a legend. My childhood hero. He fundamentally created modern martial arts. But his daughter producing some NFT bullshit in his name doesn’t surprise me one bit.