Disney goes on trial over 'Moana' copyright infringement claims

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Trial began Tuesday over claims Walt Disney Co. stole the story of its 2016 blockbuster “Moana” from an animator who years earlier had shared his draft for a Polynesian-themed movie about a young surfer with a relative who worked at the time with a movie production company with a “first-look” arrangement with the entertainment giant.

Jury selection started in downtown Los Angeles for the trial that will need to resolve whether Disney’s animation studio had access to animator Buck Woodall’s script and sketches for “Bucky the Surfer Boy” and whether Woodall’s story is similar enough to “Moana” to support his copyright infringement claims.

Unfortunately for Woodall, he waited too long to file his lawsuit in 2020, after he had seen “Moana” for the first time in late 2016 and had become suspicious that he had been ripped off by the movie studio. As a result, most of his claims were barred by the statute of limitations. The only infringement claims left are those against Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment, the distributor of the DVD and Blu-ray disks of the movie.

“it is undisputed plaintiff suspected ‘Moana’ used plaintiff’s allegedly confidential ‘Bucky’ materials when he watched ‘Moana’** in the theater in December 2016, and plaintiff had further suspicions that ‘Moana’ used plaintiff’s ‘Bucky’ materials in March 2017 when he watched ‘Moana’ on DVD,” U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall said in her Nov. 1 decision throwing out Woodall’s claims against Walt Disney’s other business units on summary judgment.

Woodall filed a second lawsuit in January, bringing similar copyright infringement claims over “Moana 2,” the sequel Disney released in 2024, and seeking $10 billion in damages from the entertainment behemoth. Marshall, however, rebuffed his attempt to combine the two cases and delay the trial.

The animator also has unsuccessfully tried to get Disney’s streaming business Disney+ into the trial. The judge on Monday again denied Woodall’s request to let his damages expert testify about the revenue Disney+ receives from “Moana” because, she said, Disney+ is a separate entity from Buena Vista Home Entertainment, the only defendant left in the case.

Woodall claims that Jenny Marchick, the stepsister of his brother’s wife, orchestrated a scheme to steal his “Bucky” story to further her career in the movie business. According to Woodall, a native of New Mexico, his idea for “Bucky” was inspired by his “unique exposure” to Polynesian culture and he spent $500,000 creating, writing and developing a movie package for “Bucky.”

In 2003, he shared this so-called presentation package, including the script he had written, with Marchick who worked at Mandeville Films, the movie production company that had a “first-look” arrangement with Disney, so that the studio had the right of first refusal to distribute any movies Mandeville wanted to produce.

Woodall claims that Marchick prompted him to provide her with an even more detailed treatment of his proposed movie, including an animated trailer and story boards, which he says were used by Disney’s animation studio to create “Moana.”

“Both ‘Bucky’ and ‘Moana’ tell the story about a teenager who defies parental warnings and embarks on a dangerous voyage across Polynesian waters to save the endangered land of a Polynesian island,” according to Woodall. “Both ‘Bucky’ and ‘Moana’ celebrate what the ‘Bucky’ script refers to as the Polynesian people’s ‘unfettered access to the sea as a native right.’”

The jury will have decide whether Disney’s animation studio had in fact access to Woodall’s “Bucky” materials. The studio had denied that Marchick gave it the script and other materials and that, in any case, it doesn’t look at unsolicited movie proposals and develops its features in-house.

In addition, the jury will be asked whether “Bucky” and “Moana” are substantially similar under the so-called intrinsic test, which is the standard whether, to an ordinary observer, the works are similar in concept and feel.

The judge will herself apply to extrinsic tests, which is a more objective assessment whether there are protectable, as opposed to mere generic, elements of “Bucky” that are copied by “Moana.”

“‘Moana’** incorporates the efforts of hundreds of people who devoted more than a million hours in the aggregate working on the movie over a five-year period,” Disney argued last year in its motion for summary judgment. “Prior to this lawsuit, the filmmakers had never heard of plaintiff or his project. They had never met or communicated with Marchick. And they had never seen any ‘Bucky’ materials. In short, ‘Moana’ was not inspired by or based in any way on Woodall or ‘Bucky.’”

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