Disney is being sued by an animator who claims that the company unfairly used his decades-old screenplay as the basis for the popular series Moana.
In a lawsuit filed Friday in a federal court in California, Buck Woodall claimed that Disney had stolen numerous parts of a screenplay he had created for the animated movie Bucky.
In the 2016 original, Auli’i Cravalho plays the role of Moana, an adventurous adolescent who embarks on a perilous quest to rescue her people. Along the voyage, she meets Dwayne Johnson’s character Maui, who serves as her guide. Word-of-mouth triumph, the movie made over $680 million (£535 million) worldwide and was streamed on Disney+ for more than 1 billion hours.
Last November, a California court dismissed Woodall’s lawsuit against Disney, ruling that it was filed too late. The animator was able to sue the production giant again on the identical grounds after Moana 2 was released.
The lawsuit accuses Jenny Marchick, the current head of development at DreamWorks Animation and a former development director at Mandeville Films, of engaging in a “fraudulent enterprise that encompassed the theft, misappropriation, and extensive exploitation of Woodall’s copyrighted materials.”
According to the lawsuit, Woodall provided Marchick with a screenplay and trailer for Bucky in 2003. Over the following few years, Marchick was requested to provide additional documents, such as storyboards, production plans, budgets, and character designs. According to Woodall, he provided “extremely large quantities of intellectual property and trade secrets” for the Bucky and Bucky the Wave Warrior projects, and Marchick assured her that she would secure the film’s approval.
According to the lawsuit, “after more than 17 years of inspiration and work on his animated film project, Woodall delivered to the defendants virtually all constituent parts necessary for its development and production, which led to the production of Disney’s Moana.”
Additionally, it highlights purported similarities between Moana 2 and Bucky.
Set in an old Polynesian village, both follow youngsters who embark on a perilous journey to save their land and encounter ancient spirits that take the form of animals along the way.
The suit clearly identifies details that are taken from the Bucky screenplay, such as the rooster and pig companions, a meeting with the Kakamora warrior tribe, and a vortex that leads to a gateway.
According to the lawsuit, “Moana and her crew are drawn into a dangerous oceanic portal that resembles a whirlpool, another dramatic and distinctive device-imagery found in Plaintiffs materials that could not possibly have been developed by chance or without malicious intentions.”
According to Woodall, his Bucky materials were protected by copyright in 2004 and were updated in 2014.
Although Bucky never made it into development, he claimed that Marchick had taken use of legal loopholes to give Disney access to his materials.
Woodall is requesting an order prohibiting further infringement of his copyrights as well as damages equal to 2.5% of Moana’s gross income, or $10 billion (£8.2 billion).
Disney and Universal Pictures, the parent company of DreamWorks Animation, have been contacted by The Independent for comment.
Disney asserted that nobody engaged in the creation of Moana had viewed the animator’s work in response to Woodall’s initial lawsuit.
Director Ron Clements stated in a court filing that “Moana was not inspired by or based in any way on [Woodall] or his Bucky project which I learned of for the first time after this lawsuit was filed.”
In order to prove that Moana was created independently of Bucky, Disney provided the court with a number of Moana-related papers, including research, story ideas, early screenplay drafts and scripts, and travel journals.
