A traveling Van Gogh exhibit called the Van Gogh Experience has been drawing a few comparisons to Attack on Titan. When I first saw an ad on my Facebook timeline in March, I couldn’t help but immediately compare the photo to Attack on Titan.
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The Van Gogh Exhibit Ad Closely Resembles Attack on Titan
Do you see the similarity? Here’s the ad as it appeared on my Facebook timeline in March. Similar ads are running in different regions as the traveling exhibit moves locations. Van Gogh looks just like a Titan, peering through a window at the smaller people inside.
Here’s what I’m talking about. Check out these scenes from Attack on Titan and compare them to the ad.
The second picture especially, which occurs when Bertholdt is telling his backstory in Season 1 Episode 3 about how he encountered a Titan, looks almost eerily similar to the photo in the Van Gogh exhibit ad.
When I first saw the ad, I had hoped that maybe Van Gogh had painted something just like this and perhaps was the subconscious inspiration for some of those Attack on Titan scenes. But that is not the case. If anything, it was Attack on Titan that inspired the ad. Van Gogh never had a painting that showed his face looming large while peering through arches. Instead, that’s a creative license they used to show what the Van Gogh Experience is like. The painting of the man is a self-portrait that Van Gogh made of himself. You can see the original here. You can also see the self-portrait at the entrance of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (but not with the arches.)
So in other words, it’s modified for the immersive experience’s ad, and Van Gogh didn’t secretly inspire Attack on Titan. That’s disappointing, but I still can’t help but wonder if the creator of the ad itself was perhaps inspired by Attack on Titan. The Van Gogh Immersive Experience itself is a virtual reality experience with tickets available in many cities across the country and the world. Each visit takes about 60 to 75 minutes, and the experiences are hosted at secret locations in each city.
The experience looks amazing, but the video below doesn’t have the same “Attack on Titan vibe” that I get from the Facebook ad.
There’s a similar experience called “Beyond Van Gogh” (or Immersive Van Gogh) in some locations and is run a little differently where you walk through the experience rather than using VR.
People have been combining Attack on Titan and Van Gogh long before I noticed the similarity in the ad. This is a great example:
Best "Scream" inspired painting. Lol. ctto: artist of this painting#AttackOnTitan #arminarlert #aot #Scream #VanGogh #titan #colossaltitan pic.twitter.com/mAqxX93pEQ
— Andy Enero (@thewandringkind) April 13, 2021
If you’re not familiar with Attack on Titan, you can watch it on Funimation (with subtitles or English dubs) here. Or you can watch it on Hulu here.
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