Photo: AP // Disney
Disney has been accused of stealing the idea for Moana from a story about a young surfer. As the Associated Press reports, writer and animator Buck Woodall has sued the studio on the grounds that they copied the story from a script he wrote decades ago. Woodall’s lawyers will deliver closing arguments at a federal trial in Los Angeles on Monday.
The script Woodall says Disney copied has gone by various names, including “Bucky the Surfer Boy.” In it, a teenager vacationing in Hawaii befriends a group of native Hawaiians and goes on a quest to save a sacred part of the islands from a developer. The lawsuit alleges that Moana bears many similarities to his script, including a 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,” a “main character who encounters a demigod with a giant hook and tattoos,” and “protagonists who learn about ancient Polynesian culture during a sea voyage.”
To win the case, Woodall’s attorneys must prove the two films have substantial similarity and that Disney had access to his work. Woodall says he gave the script to a distant relative who worked for another company on the Disney lot in 2004. According to Disney’s lawyers, nobody there ever saw it.
As to the similarity of the works, Disney claims any similarities between the two stories are incidental, and equally resembles elements of many previous works from the studio. To that end, over the course of the case, the jury watched Moana in its entirety, as well as scenes from several other films from the same directors, including The Little Mermaid.
