Inspirations for characters in films can come from any number of avenues or places.

In The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger borrowed heavily from Malcolm MacDowell's performance in A Clockwork Orange. Christian Bale took from Tom Cruise for Patrick Bateman's polite-but-vacant look in American Psycho and even Ben Kingsley based Don Logan from Sexy Beast on his granny.

The point is that people take inspiration, be it visually or personality-wise, from all sorts of places. It can even be musicians. For example, Jared Leto recently commented that David Bowie served as an inspiration for his take on Joker. However, there was undoubtedly another inspiration for both Joker and Harley Quinn that didn't get a nod during Suicide Squad's press tour.

 

South African rap-rave group (could you call them rap-rave?) Die Antwood uploaded a video on their official Instagram which called out Jared Leto, Margot Robbie and director David Ayer for copying their look. The short video shows a number of side-by-side images of Ninja and Yolandi Visser side-by-side with Jared Leto's Joker and Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn and, it has to be said, the similarities are striking.

You could argue that the tattooed look is more closer to pop-punk from the late '90s, but there's a few aspects of Harley Quinn's costume that are definitely pointed towards Yolandi Visser's look. It's hard to say precisely what constitutes an homage and what's outright plagiarism in a case like this.

For Yolandi Visser, however, it's clearly plagiarism as he specifically points to Cara Delevigne and Jared Leto as witnesses, saying that "Cara & Jared told us how much u were talkin abt us on set but u never asked our permision to rip us off. (sic)" Visser explained that David Ayer called Ninja - real name Watkin Tudor Jones - before the movie came out, but didn't reference him or ask their permission to borrow from their style during the film.

It's hard to say if there's a legal case here as Die Antwoord obviously can't trademark a look or a style, but it is pretty clear cut when you see it side by side.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!