Disney didn’t copy ‘Moana’ from a man’s story of a surfer boy, a jury says

LOS ANGELES — A jury on Monday quickly 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 only about 2 ? 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 didn’t even have to consider the similarities between “Bucky” and Disney’s 2016 hit animated film about a questing Polynesian princess.

Woodall had shared his work with the stepsister of his brother’s wife, 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,” 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, Woodall’s attorney said that a long chain of circumstantial evidence and similarities so numerous they can’t be coincidences make it clear that his story “Bucky the Surfer Boy” was the basis for the hit 2016 animated film.

“There was no ‘Moana’ without ‘Bucky,’” Lage said during closing arguments in a Los Angeles courtroom.

Defense lawyer Moez Kaba said that the evidence shows 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,” Kaba said in his closing. “They had never seen it, never heard of it.”

Musker and Disney attorneys declined comment outside the courtroom.

“Moana” earned nearly $700 million in global box office.

A judge previously ruled that 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 $1 billion — must be decided separately. That suit remains active, though the jury’s decision does not bode well for it.

The relatively young jury of six women and two men watched “Moana” in its entirety in the courtroom. They considered a 2004 story outline that Woodall, a New Mexico writer and animator, 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.

Jurors would have had to decide whether the two works had “substantial similarity,” a question that much of the trial addressed, but their instructions told them to stop if they answered “no” to the access question.

Around 2004, Woodall gave the “Bucky” outline to the stepsister of his brother’s wife. That woman, Jenny Marchick, worked for Mandeville Films, a company that had a contract with Disney to create live-action films and was located on the Disney lot. He sent her follow-up materials through the years. He testified that he was stunned when he saw “Moana” in 2016 and saw so many of his ideas.

Marchick was cast as the mastermind of the theft in his original lawsuit before she was dropped as a defendant. She testified that she had not shown “Bucky” to anyone at Disney. And messages shared by the defense showed she eventually ignored Woodall’s queries to her and told her stepsister that she’d told Woodall there was nothing she could do for him.

Disney attorney Kaba argued there was no evidence Marchick ever worked on “Moana” or received any credit or compensation for it. He emphasized to jurors that Woodall had to prove the “Bucky” materials got to the creators of “Moana” and not merely someone with connections to the corporation.

Lage outlined the similarities of the two works in his closing.

Both include Polynesian demigods as major characters, with the figures of Maui, Te Fiti and a fiery volcano goddess in “Moana” clearly counterparts of the divine characters in “Bucky.”

Both include shape-shifting characters who turn into, among other things, insects and sharks.

Both include the main characters interacting with animals who act as spirit helpers.

And Lage said Moana struggling to learn to sail in her quest echoes Bucky’s struggle to learn to surf for his.

“How many coincidences are too many?” the lawyer asked. “When does a coincidence stop being a coincidence?”

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

Many others, including shapeshifting characters, appear throughout films including “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” and “Hercules,” which made Musker and Clements essential to the Disney renaissance of the 1990s and made Disney a global powerhouse.

Many others, including animal guides, go back to Disney movies as early as 1940’s “Pinocchio” and appear in Musker and Clements’ previous films.

Kaba said Musker and 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 show every step of Musker and Clements’ creation, whose spark came from the paintings of Paul Gauguin and the writings of Herman Melville

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

And none of the extensive Disney documentation makes any mention of Bucky, the lawyer argued.

“This is Ron and John’s story,” Kaba said. “No matter what they tell you, this is not Buck Woodall’s story.”

Dalton writes for the Associated Press.