Disney did not copy Moana from man’s story of surfer boy, jury says

A jury on Monday quickly and completely rejected a man’s claim that Disney’s Moana was stolen from his story of a young surfer in Hawaii.

The Los Angeles federal jury deliberated for around two and a half hours before deciding that the creators of Moana never had access to writer and animator Buck Woodall’s outlines and script for Bucky the Surfer Boy.

With that question settled, the jury of six women and two men did not even have to consider the similarities between Bucky and Disney’s 2016 hit animated film about a questing Polynesian princess.

Mr Woodall had shared his work with a distant relative, who worked for a different company on the Disney lot, but the woman testified during the two-week trial that she never showed it to anyone at Disney.

“Obviously, we’re disappointed,” Mr Woodall’s attorney Gustavo Lage said outside court. “We’re going to review our options and think about the best path forward.”

In closing arguments earlier Monday, Mr Woodall’s attorney said that a long chain of circumstantial evidence showed the two works were inseparable.

“There was no Moana without Bucky,” Mr Lage said.

Defence lawyer Moez Kaba said that the evidence showed overwhelmingly that Moana was clearly the creation and “crowning achievement” of the 40-year career of John Musker and Ron Clements, 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,” Mr Kaba said in his closing. “They had never seen it, never heard of it.”

After their victory, Mr Musker and Disney lawyers declined to comment.

Moana earned nearly 700 million dollars (£541 million) at the global box office.

A judge previously ruled that Mr Woodall’s 2020 lawsuit came too late for him to claim a piece of those receipts and that a lawsuit he filed earlier this year over Moana 2 — which earned more than one billion dollars (£773 million) — must be decided separately.

That suit remains active, though the jury’s decision does not bode well.

Judge Consuelo B Marshall, who is also overseeing the sequel lawsuit, said after the verdict that she agreed with the jurors’ decision about access.

The relatively young jury of six women and two men watched Moana in its entirety in the courtroom. They considered a story outline that Mr Woodall created for Bucky in 2003, along with a 2008 update and a 2011 script.

In the latter versions of the story, the title character, vacationing in Hawaii with his parents, befriends a group of Native Hawaiian youth and goes on a quest that includes time travel to the ancient islands and interactions with demigods to save a sacred site from a developer.

Around 2004, Mr Woodall gave the Bucky outline to the step-sister of his brother’s wife.

That woman, Jenny Marchick, worked for Mandeville Films, a company that had a contract with Disney and was located on the Disney lot. He sent her follow-up materials through the years and testified that he was stunned when he saw Moana in 2016 and saw so many of his ideas.

Along with Ms Marchick’s evidence saying she didn’t show Bucky to anyone, messages shared by the defence showed she eventually ignored Mr Woodall’s queries to her and had told him there was nothing she could do for him.

Disney attorney Mr Kaba argued there was no evidence Ms Marchick ever worked on Moana or received any credit or compensation for it.

Mr Kaba pointed out that Ms Marchick, who is now head of features development at DreamWorks Animation, worked for key Disney competitors Sony and Fox during much of the time she was allegedly making use of Mr Woodall’s work for Disney.

Mr Woodall also submitted the script directly to Disney and had a meeting with an assistant at the Disney Channel, which Ms Marchick arranged for him, to talk about working as an animator. But jurors agreed that this didn’t give them reason to believe that Bucky made its way to Mr Musker, Mr Clements or their collaborators.

Mr Lage, Mr Woodall’s lawyer, outlined some of the similarities of the two works in his closing.

Both include teens on oceanic quests. Both have Polynesian demigods as central figures and shape-shifting characters who turn into, among other things, insects and sharks.

In both, the main characters interact with animals who act as spirit helpers.

Mr Kaba said many of these elements, including Polynesian lore and basic “staples of literature”, are not copyrightable.

Shape-shifting among supernatural characters, he said, appears throughout films, including The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Hercules, which made Mr Musker and Mr Clements essential to the Disney renaissance of the 1990s and made Disney a global powerhouse.

Animal guides go back to movies as early as 1940’s Pinocchio and appear in all of Mr Musker and Mr Clements’ previous films, he said.

Mr Kaba said Mr Musker and Mr Clements developed Moana the same way they did the other films, through their own inspiration, research, travel and creativity.

The lawyer said thousands of pages of development documents showed every step of Mr Musker and Mr Clements’ creation, whose spark came from the paintings of Paul Gaugin and the writings of Herman Melville

“You can see every single fingerprint,” Mr Kaba said. “You can see the entire genetic makeup of Moana.”