LOS ÁNGELES (AP) — A jury quickly and decisively rejected a man’s claim that Disney’s “Moana” was plagiarized from his story about a young surfer in Hawaii.
The federal jury in Los Angeles deliberated for about two and a half hours before deciding on Monday that the creators of “Moana” never had access to Buck Woodall’s schemes and script for “Bucky the Surfer Boy”.
With that issue resolved, the jury, made up of six women and two men, didn’t even have to consider the similarities between “Bucky” and the successful 2016 Disney animated movie about a Polynesian princess searching for her identity.
Woodall had shared his work with a distant relative who worked for a different company on Disney’s lot, but the woman testified during the two-week trial that he never showed it to anyone at Disney.
“Obviously, we are disappointed,” said Woodall’s lawyer, Gustavo Lage, outside the court. “We will review our options and consider the best way forward.”
In closing arguments earlier on Monday, Woodall’s lawyer claimed that a long chain of circumstantial evidence showed that the two works were inseparable.
“There was no ‘Moana’ without ‘Bucky’,” Lage said.
Defense attorney Moez Kaba stated that the evidence overwhelmingly showed that “Moana” was clearly the creation and “culminating achievement” of John Musker and Ron Clements' 40-year career, the writers and directors behind 1989’s “The Little Mermaid,” 1992’s “Aladdin,” 1997’s “Hercules,” and 2009’s “The Princess and the Frog.”
“They had no idea about Bucky,” Kaba said in his closing. “They had never seen him, they had never heard of him.”
“Moana” grossed nearly 700 million dollars at the worldwide box office.
A judge had previously ruled that Woodall’s lawsuit filed in 2020 came too late for him to claim a share of those earnings, and that a lawsuit he filed earlier this year regarding “Moana 2” — which grossed over 1 billion dollars — must be decided separately. That lawsuit is still active, although the jury’s decision does not bode well for it. Judge Consuelo B. Marshall, who is also overseeing the second lawsuit, said after the verdict that she agreed with the jury’s decision.
“We are incredibly proud of the collective work that was done in the creation of Moana and we are pleased that the jury found that it had nothing to do with the works of the plaintiff,” Disney said in a statement.
Musker and Disney’s lawyers refused to comment outside the courtroom.
The relatively young jury, made up of six women and two men, watched “Moana” in its entirety in the courtroom. They considered a story outline that Woodall created for “Bucky” in 2003, along with an update from 2008 and a script from 2011.
In the most recent versions of the story, the titular character, who goes on vacation to Hawaii with his parents, befriends a group of young native Hawaiians and embarks on a quest that includes time travel to ancient islands and interactions with demigods to save a sacred site.
Around 2004, Woodall gave the “Bucky” scheme to his stepsister-in-law. That woman, Jenny Marchick, worked for Mandeville Films, a company that had a contract with Disney and was located on Disney’s lot. She sent follow-up materials over the years. She testified that she was stunned when she saw “Moana” in 2016 and saw so many of her ideas.
Along with Marchick’s testimony, in which he stated that he did not show “Bucky” to anyone, the messages shared by the defense showed that he eventually ignored Woodall’s inquiries and had told him that there was nothing he could do for him.
Disney’s lawyer, Kaba, argued that there was no evidence that Marchick had ever worked on “Moana” or received any credit or compensation for it.
Kaba pointed out that Marchick, now head of feature development at DreamWorks Animation, worked for major Disney competitors such as Sony and Fox for much of the time she was supposedly using Woodall’s work for Disney.
Woodall also presented the script directly to Disney and had a meeting with an assistant at Disney Channel, which Marchick organized for him, to discuss working as an animator. However, the judges agreed that this did not give them reason to believe that “Bucky” would reach Musker, Clements, or their collaborators.
Lage, Woodall’s lawyer, outlined some of the similarities between the two works in his closing statement.
Both include teenagers in oceanic searches.
Both have Polynesian demigods as central figures and characters that shapeshift, turning into insects and sharks, among other things.
In both of them, the main characters interact with animals that act as spiritual helpers.
Kaba stated that many of these elements, including Polynesian tradition and “basic elements of literature,” are not protectable by copyright.
The shape-shifting between supernatural characters, he said, appears in movies like “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” and “Hercules,” which made Musker and Clements essential for Disney’s renaissance in the 1990s and turned Disney into a global powerhouse.
Animal sidekicks date back to movies as old as “Pinocchio” from 1940 and appear in all of Musker and Clements' previous films, he said.
Kaba stated that Musker and Clements developed “Moana” in the same way they did with their other films, through their own inspiration, research, travels, and creativity.
The lawyer said that thousands of pages of development documents showed every step of the creation of Musker and Clements, whose inspiration came from the paintings of Paul Gauguin and the writings of Herman Melville.
“You can see every fingerprint,” Kaba said. “You can see the entire genetic composition of ‘Moana’.”