Disney wins copyright infringement lawsuit from animator who claims Moana idea was stolen

At the beginning of the year, The Walt Disney Company was facing a lawsuit from an animator who claimed that the Moana movies borrowed heavily from a script and art of his own, adding that he was duped by another studio into sharing these ideas. The damages the animator had sought was a whopping $10 billion.

The Hollywood Reporter has now given the update that the Disney studio has emerged as the victor in the copyright infringement case. The case came from animator Buck Woodall, who had the idea titled Bucky and the Surfer Boy. According to The Associated Press, after just over a mere two hours of deliberation, the jury would find that Disney had not borrowed the ideas on the count that “none of its employees ever saw works related to his screenplay.”

The finding from the jury was based on the defense that Disney never had the access to Woodall’s works, as he claimed. The prosecutor had only filed the complaint with Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment, which sells the DVDs and Blu-rays of the original 2016 film, after his window to sue Disney entirely would pass by under the three-year statute of limitations for copyright infringement. It was also said that most of this filing focuses on Moana 2, which was released last November. Of note, Woodall never actually made his planned movie, titled Bucky.

In the lawsuit, Woodall claimed that Jenny Marchick, a one-time development director at Mandeville Films (whose Disney partnership resulted in movies like 2017’s Beauty and the Beast and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers), relayed key materials – including a script, illustrations and more – to Disney. To quote the 33-page filing: [Disney and Marchick] “participated in a fraudulent enterprise that encompassed the theft, misappropriation, and extensive exploitation of Woodall’s copyrighted materials, intellectual property, and trade secrets as set forth in this Complaint. This conspiracy was marked by a web of coordinated actions, including but not limited to: deliberate misrepresentations to deceive Woodall; systematic concealment of critical evidence; covert meetings to plan their infringing activities; and the distribution of stolen materials across various platforms…” 

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