A California jury found that Disney’s Moana did not steal its idea from animator Buck Woodall’s decades-old screenplay about a young Hawaiian surfer.
After deliberating for over two hours on Monday, the jury ruled that no Disney employee had access to Woodall’s storyboards or script for an animated film titled Bucky, which he claimed to have shared with an executive in the early 2000s.
“We are obviously disappointed. We are going to review our options and think about the best path forward,” Woodall’s attorney Gustavo Lage said.
A Disney spokesperson said they were “incredibly proud of the collective work that went into the making of Moana” and “pleased that the jury found it had nothing to do with plaintiff’s works”.
Woodall filed a suit in 2020 claiming Disney lifted many elements of a screenplay he had written for Bucky and alleging a “fraudulent enterprise that encompassed the theft, misappropriation and extensive exploitation” of his copyrighted materials by former Mandeville Films development director Jenny Marchick.
Marchick’s stepsister is Woodall’s sister-in-law.
Woodall’s suit said he gave Marchick a screenplay and trailer for Bucky in 2003 as well as “extremely large quantities of intellectual property and trade secrets” after the director had convinced him she would get the film greenlit.
Marchick testified at the trial that she did meet Woodall as a favour to her sister, but she was “100 per cent confident” she never passed on any of his Bucky content to any employee at Disney, according to a report by Courthouse News Service.
She did speak to the studio about Woodall’s script but was informed that they didn’t accept outside pitches. She stated that she then helped Woodall meet an unidentified assistant at Disney TV animation who wasn’t interested.
Marchick said that she lost touch with Woodall after this point until he reached out in 2011 with a full-length screenplay for Bucky, which she was no longer interested in, believing it was “simplistic and juvenile”.
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Moez Kaba, the defence lawyer, pointed out that Marchick, now head of development at DreamWorks Animation, worked for competitors Sony and Fox for a majority of the duration that Woodall had sent her materials for Bucky.
In closing arguments, Lage told the jury that there was plenty of circumstantial evidence that showed the influence Bucky had on Moana. “How many coincidences are too many? When does a coincidence stop being a coincidence? There was no Moana without Bucky,” he said.
Kaba countered that Moana was the “crowning achievement” of John Musker and Ron Clements, who had also written and directed Disney hits like The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), Hercules (1997), and The Princess and the Frog (2009).
“They had no idea about Bucky,” Kaba said. “They had never seen it, never heard of it.”
Musker, in his testimony, denied all accusations he and Clements had indulged in plagiarism. He pointed out that the narrative of Moana was inspired by elements from their previous Disney projects like The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Hercules, which featured a teenaged hero overcoming obstacles and uncovering profound truths about themselves in the process.
The jury was shown scenes from those films to support the Disney claim.
Kaba cited reams of emails and documents tracking Moana’s development and showing that Musker and Clements took inspiration from the paintings of Paul Gaugin and the writings of Herman Melville, while Woodall or Bucky were not mentioned anywhere.
“You can see every single fingerprint,” he said. “You can see the entire genetic makeup of Moana.”
Moana, released in 2016, tells the story of an adventurous teenager named Moana, voiced by Auli’i Cravalho, who sets sail on a dangerous mission to save her people. Along the journey, she meets Maui, voiced by Dwayne Johnson, who becomes her guide. The film was a word-of-mouth success, grossing more than £535m globally and streaming for over a billion hours on Disney+.
Moana 2, which released in November 2024 and received an Academy Award nomination for best animated feature, sees the Polynesian teenager reunite with Maui for another ocean adventure after she gets an unexpected call from her wave finding ancestors. The sequel made $1.05bn worldwide, making it the third highest-grossing film of 2024.
The jury’s decision revolved primarily around the finding that Disney never saw Woodall’s work, which meant they did not have to consider the alleged similarities between Bucky and Moana.
Woodall, who lives in Mexico, first sued Disney for at least $100m in damages in 2020, but a California court ruled in November that his filing had come too late and dismissed it. Woodall was still able to bring his suit to trial against Disney’s home video subsidiary Buena Vista Home Entertainment, which released the film on DVD in 2017.
The release of Moana 2 allowed the animator to sue the production giant anew on the same basis in January, seeking at least $10bn in damages.
Though the suit is still active, judge Consuelo B Marshall, who is also overseeing the sequel lawsuit, said she agreed with the jury’s decision, a comment that does not look positive for the outcome in favour of Woodall.
