Disney faces lawsuit for allegedly copying Zootopia
Why is he only saying something about it now? The film came out a whole year ago and it must have been known Disney was developing a film with anthro animals called Zootopia long before that. Seems a bit fishy. Especially seeing that anthropomorphic animals with characteristics to fit their animal honestly isn't a novel idea
>Seems a bit fishy.
That a copyright challenge against Disney took a year to be filed?
I'd hope there's more to the complaint than OPs pic. Cause that shit is thin.
Of course there's more to the complaint. What do you think you're contributing?
>I invented humanized animals
>Disney owes me money
Disney will win, and ZT will gain even MORE publicity.
Goldman Zootopia looks awful, but they say the court shouldn't let the guy who stole your car have it because he looks better in it.
Still, the concept art look different enough and the concept itself is too vague to pin anything substantial. Still though, there's a chance that this will make Disney sit on the franchise rather than continue it and risk further legal actions.
Did either of you actually read the court documents? Disney actually completely ripped off the guy's idea.
Who will win?
>namefag
>not being a complete and utter retard
Disney is pretty powerful. Regardless of stealing, they have access to vast money and the most expensive lawyers.
Am I really the only one here who bothered to read what was posted? Did everyone else just come to this thread, look at a single image and form an opinion?
I don't even know who this fucker is, but he isn't claiming Disney just drew some cartoon animals. He pitched a project called Zootopia to Disney on two separate occasions with thematic, structural and design similarities to the film they put out.
Disney. Best case scenario is it gets settled. Worst case scenario is they bleed the stupid bastard for years as a show of dominance. Those people are fucking monsters, and they will hurt you for challenging them.
Impossible, Disney is the greatest and best company on earth. They would never steal some hacks idea.
This is just a piece of shit trying to steal money from a hugely successful movie. Nothing more.
The little guy, because we live in a fair and just world. They definitely won't drag the case out for years until the guy is completely ruined.
>When the plaintiff admits they want to fuck Shakira's fursona
That being said, there are a lot of similarities between the two Zootopias
Disney will be able to dodge the accusation through the power of $$$, of course so nothing will come of this lawsuit
However, if Goldman wanted to make his case stronger he should have highlighted the timeline of Zootopia concept art released over the years. A lot of the earlier pieces released way back when for Zootopia looked pretty different from Goldman's shit, but I can't say that about whatever was released closer to the movie's overhaul
He doesn't have to contribute shit to be skeptical of this claim
He didn't even read the claim. How the fuck can he be skeptical of it?
Wasn't this based on a book?
That would punch the bottom out of his claims.
Go back being dead in a refrigerator, Walt.
Kimba all over again. That hardly went anywhere neither will this. In 20 years people discussing Zootopia on the internet will still be interrupted by people posting OP's pic as proof that Disney is bad, though.
>Wasn't this based on a book?
No.
>Wasn't this based on a book?
Where are you getting that from?
Its not the only one. Coco is stupid close to earlier pitch materials done by Gutierrez
Disney IS bad, though.
I faintly remember somebody bitching about much nuance and context being lost in adaptation as they had to distill it down from a much more complex universe.
Everybody should join together for nice class-action. Maybe get everybody a sweet out of court settlement.
Never! Now go watch Beauty and the Beast so we can get that billion
Lies!
>Wew
Sup, Sup Forums!
That's fine. I enjoyed Lion King and Zootopia though. I honestly wouldn't give a fuck if they are total ripoffs because I consider them well done ripoffs.
This guys a retard if he thinks he can beat the mouse in a fucking lawsuit. Pick your battles dumbass
What changed was the Internet. It's harder to hide things like this.
>I faintly remember somebody bitching
Maybe in the future you shouldn't accept things said on the internet as fact so readily.
Likely why it took him so long to file. Need to have enough ammunition abd defense.
Is that exclusively a Sup Forums thing? I've used it on pretty much every board I go to
Well coco was confirmed to be a ripoff of El Libro De la Vida since Jorge propised the concept to disney before he went to sony
>(((Goldman)))
End Jew on Jew Shekelcide.
The only similarity between TBOL
and Coco is the Dia De Los Muertos setting.
>In the lawsuit, Disney is alleged to have a track record of ripping off work including The Lion King, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Up, Inside Out and more.
I know about Kimba, what's the story behind these other ones?
>The beginning of the document is shit-talking Disney's hypocrisy with lawsuits
Fucking brass. Some of the points are real stretches but I hope it doesn't go too sour for Goldman, sounds like he's been shafted by the mouse.
Disney will either settle for a pittance or ram this fucker's face into the ground for a laugh. Nobody wins against The House of Mouse's Lawyers.
Defendants’ unauthorized appropriation of others’ intellectual property
15 is a corporate practice that has generated tremendous profits. They did it with The
16 Lion King when they copied Osamu Tezuka’s Kimba The White Lion. They did it
17 with Toy Story when they copied Jim Henson’s The Christmas Toy. They did it with
18 Monsters, Inc. when they copied Stanley Mouse’s Wise G’Eye. They did it with Up
19 when they copied Yannick Banchereau’s Above Then Beyond. They did it with the
20 Frozen trailer when they copied Kelly Wilson’s The Snowman. And, they did it
21 with Inside Out when they copied Frédéric Mayer’s and Cédric Jeanne’s Cortex
22 Academy, among other sources.
23
3.
They did it with Zootopia, too, when they copied Gary L. Goldman’s
Sounds like you're thinking of somebody talking about one of the earlier drafts.
In the case of Kimba the White Lion? That series is boring as hell. Also you know how Simba eats bugs to survive? Kimba is worse because he FORCES all carnivores to eat vegetables. It's not a choice for him, but a law he forces on ALL animals in the Savannah. Fuck Kimba.
>Disney is now facing a serious lawsuit alleging that Oscar-winning animation film Zootopia was copied from the work of Gary L. Goldman, a reputable author whose distinguished credits includes writing Total Recall and Next and producing Minority Report.
>The complaint filed on Tuesday in California federal court comes from Esplanade Productions, Inc., which is being represented by the prominent law firm of Quinn Emanuel.
>It opens by quoting Zootopia director Byron Howard as saying, "Don’t worry if you feel like you’re copying something, because if it comes through you, it’s going to filter through you and you’re going to bring your own unique perspective to it."
In the lawsuit, Disney is alleged to have a track record of ripping off work including The Lion King, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Up, Inside Out and more.
"They did it with Zootopia, too, when they copied Gary L. Goldman’s Zootopia," states the complaint. "Twice — in 2000 and 2009 — Goldman, on behalf of Esplanade, pitched Defendants his Zootopia franchise, which included a live-action component called Looney and an animated component called Zootopia. He provided a treatment, a synopsis, character descriptions, character illustrations and other materials. He even provided a title for the franchise: 'Zootopia.' Instead of lawfully acquiring Goldman’s work, Defendants said they were not interested in producing it and sent him on his way. Thereafter, consistent with their culture of unauthorized copying, Defendants copied Goldman’s work. They copied Goldman’s themes, settings, plot, characters, and dialogue — some virtually verbatim."
>similar visually
>both lady shaped
This is pretty dumb.
>The complaint even illustrates alleged copying of artwork:
>According to the complaint, Goldman has worked with Disney before. In 2007, he is said to have been hired to write a screenplay called Blaze based on a Stan Lee comic. Afterwards, Lee allegedly told him, "You're now my favorite writer!"
>As for Zootopia, a film about a bunny who moves to a big city and unravels a conspiracy with the aid of a con artist fox, the lawsuit claims that its source is unmistakable given Goldman's detailed work offering descriptions about characters and other elements.
>The lawsuit states that Goldman pitched former Disney executive and Mandeville Films’ CEO David Hoberman, at Disney's offices in 2000, and that everyone at the meeting "understood that writers pitch ideas and materials to studios and producers in confidence in order to sell those ideas and materials for financial compensation."
Weird that they didn't bother to change the name.
Did they copy Porto-Zootopia?
>Disney copying stuff
Nah that never happens.
Has anyone ever won in a lawsuit against Disney?
Hoberman responded favorably, continues the complaint, but his company ultimately passed.
>Nine years later, Goldman tried again to pitch his project.
>"At the time, Goldman was working on Blaze with Brigham Taylor who, Esplanade is informed and believes, was Walt Disney Pictures’ Executive Vice President of Production and Development at the time," continues the complaint. "Because Goldman had this existing relationship with Taylor, Goldman offered to pitch the Goldman Zootopia to Taylor on behalf of Defendants, and Taylor accepted Goldman’s offer. On or about February 12, 2009, Goldman met with Taylor at Defendants’ offices in Burbank, California."
>Disney is then alleged to have begun work on its own Zootopia and reproduced substantially similar expression in alleged violation of plaintiff's copyrights. The lawsuit handled by attorney Jeffrey McFarland also claims breach of implied contract, breach of confidence and unfair competition. Disney's Zootopia grossed more than $1 billion worldwide in theaters, putting substantial damages on the line. Esplanade wants an injunction plus monetary damages including of the punitive kind. (Read the full complaint.)
>A Disney spokesperson responds, "Mr. Goldman’s lawsuit is riddled with patently false allegations. It is an unprincipled attempt to lay claim to a successful film he didn’t create, and we will vigorously defend against it in court.”
>"Don’t worry if you feel like you’re copying something, because if it comes through you, it’s going to filter through you and you’re going to bring your own unique perspective to it."
God damn, I mean that is an incriminating thing to say.
I can see where he's coming from to an extent. You can't exactly create something wholly original, and having a particular style is going to help overcome those hurdles.
But it also comes across like shitty self-justification for being a plagiarist asshole.
A lot of this is reaching, even Kimba is not quite as similar to the Lion King as most people think.
I feel bad for this guy. Not because of the ripoff stuff, but because he'll be hardcore anal raped by Disney lawyers in court.
Huh. Might have been another movie I heard that about, too.
Or maybe it was that somebody said they had to tone the script down from an earlier version?
But just the wiki rundown of the pitch to product process suggests that it would be hard to call plagiarism here. They ostensibly smashed two pitches together, switched context around, changed the genre etc.
Proving that they stole ideas from a pitch is probably gonna be hard. Aside from the title, there are a few character archetypes that roughly fit, but proving what was pitched to who when and who ever saw the documents seems a bit hard to do. With a machine this big, plausible deniability is easy. And they probably get a ton of similar pitches, anyway. Even if that is all true, proving that in court betond reasonable doubt seems pointless to try. It's different animals in a group so big you can likely claim similarities to one of them just by statistical chance.
What about the "protagonist wants to be a musician but his family doesn't want him to that" part?
Not sure about some of the others, but Monsters Inc is really similar to Ahh Real Monsters once you notice it. Not necessarily in such a way that constitutes a lawsuit, but it's there.
It's so weird that you'd need to rip anyone off when you're already a furry.
Depends. The evidence presented will be the deciding factor. In this he has claims of meetings with Disney where he presented them with plot ideas, lines, settings and structure that they then used at a later time for the film Zootopia. To make those claims he better have some thing like a recording of the meetings or proof that the ideas were passed onto Disney through emails.
Without those he doesn't have much beyond the character comparison which is just slightly above weak. yes, the characteristics in the design are similar but not so much so that you can hinge an entire case on it as, similar as they are in some regards, the design and style has a huge difference.
So its a wait and see really. If he can provide evidence of most of his claims then yes, they stole it, but its going to need to extend beyond the small amount of evidence provided with the pictures.
No in the case of hamlet you philistine
I liked it. Kimba just sees all of his subjects as peers of one another and outlaws them murdering eachother. It works out because it's a saturday morning cartoon that chooses to ignore some biology and none of the animals suffer health issues. Basically, he's the original founder of the city of Zootopia.
So how much does his pitch have in common with the final product?
Yep. Just about anything with a lion protagonist could be claimed similar to Kimba. And making lions royalty isn't an innovative idea, is it?
That wasn't even Disney's first lion king. They had one in their Robin Hood, too.
>Stan Lee allegedly told him, "You're now my favorite writer!"
Is it weird that I instantly picture this in the context of them sharing drugs?
If anything Disney will probably just give him money to go away since if he even has a small chance of winning the lawsuit he'll likely get something like a past percentage of revenue from the movie worth millions of dollars.
One of the most worn out conflict tropes in entertainment.
See Rock Dog recently warming that one over.
wow, this is really upsetting
the same guy that wrote the original Total Recall wrote the reboot? Did he have a fucking stroke or took too much acid between then?
>actually defending plagiarism
Kill yourself.
They weren't permitted to trademark Dia de los Muertos, so there's that.
Kimba=Lion King is a very old meme that is easily debunked by actually watching Kimba.
oh wait, imdb has their scroll written in a very misleading way. the scroll lists him as writer but the list clearly specifies the movie was based on the movie he screeplayed
that seems needlessly complicated to include a movie on his credits he didn't directly involve himself in
They actually tried to trademark a holiday? what the fug.
As a film title, yes.
>Still though, there's a chance that this will make Disney sit on the franchise rather than continue it and risk further legal actions.
That lawsuit over Finding Nemo didn't prevent Finding Dory.
It's okay when Disney does it
>African animals
Nigger, literally half of Goldman's Zootopia characters on that list can be found in Africa.
What is this guy thinking, for fuck's sake?
What namefag are you talking about.
I think the most damning evidence in the Kimba case (besides some pretty big similarities) is the artists straight up saying in an interview "we are making a Kimba adaptation" without realizing they were going to turn out not to get the rights. It was definitely at least the plan at some point in production, though they changed things around enough that they could get away with it. The one thing they'd need to do to make it too obvious to deny would be to keep Simba and his father white as they'd originally intended.
Bunnies are better than Squirrels anyway.
Now if the original design was a mouse, on the other hand...
Goldman would have a case if any of what he pitched were particularly original to begin with.
Going through and reading , nearly every claim that Goldman makes is basically some sort of a reused trope or joke related to common interactions between animals, used to comment on social stratification between humans.
And everything he states regarding the characters can be summed as standard anthropormization.
>mice
disgusting
Skimmed through the documents. This is going to be tough.
Disney does steal ideas. But they're very good at changing them just enough to skirt legal problems. Copyright protects the execution, not the ideas themselves, so this guy needs to prove that his combination of ideas is unique. That would be hard to do against Disney, who has a deep catalogue of animals-as-society, odd couple, and detective stories to draw from.
If there's merit here, Disney is going to settle. If not, Disney is going to drag this out until he's broke or croaks. Either way, no one is going to admit fault.
>trope
>ever
You can't take someone who uses the word "trope" seriously
Did you read the whole document or just skipped to the page with the illustrations?
Just because Disney made a better Zootopia, doesn't means they had the right to do so, I'm a different user btw
Disney? Stealing ideas? Why, I NEVER!!
But really, Zootopia is a pretty generic furry world. Fuck, scratch that, I've seen furries be more original in their world ideas. Zootopia had an ok story, fantastic art direction, but at the end of the day it was just a cartoon about an animal city, one full of pretty shallow representations of the animals that inhabit it. That's par for the course regarding talking animal things. The only thing that separates it from say.. Robinhood, or better yet, Talespin, is the fact that Zootopia actually makes reference to species and the dietary needs of said species. That's it, that's literally fucking it.
Disney could easily say that they are the victims here and that the person who pitched that story to them was, in fact, copying their older work. The guy who made Zootopia basically admitted himself he did just that when he said he wanted to make a Robinhood-like movie.
So Disney wanted to cash in on a name and then didn't.
That is really not so big a thing. You can't keep people from making movies about lions and the product they turned out was bigger than anything before.
I mean, it's probably more Hamlet in there than Kimba, too.
Getting your idea from something is not plagiarism. Not by a long shot.
And it's really hard to try and call property on a character in terms of personality concept, not likeness.
The lawsuits over action movies would never end.
Maybe someone actially still remembered the pitch by Goldman in 2012 and used the title remembered from one pitch three years back. That's probably the biggest thing connecting them.
And in big parts of the world the movie isn't even called that.
Other than that? I guess you can't really patent hot latinas, can you?
If there is a script you can just check for copied and paraphrased sections. If you have two movies, parallels are easy to show. Proving they worked from your pitch years later? Maybe if they had done the movie three years earlier so they would have to go into production with his pitch. Why would they wait for another guy to have pitches and then warp his idea into yours, or something similar?
Tangentially related, but worth consideration.
I'm still used to calling them cliches and conventions. But I'm not going to be the ornery old man that refuses to adopt the new lingo. When in Rome, user.
>A lot of this is reaching
You haven't really watched the Kimba anime if you think that this is reaching. So many elements of Kimba have been used in Lion King.
>A wise baboon
>Bumbling hyenas
>A young lioness love-interest
>A Zazu-like bird
>An evil darker lion with an eye ailment. In "Kimba" his name is Claw.
To top it all off:
>Matthew Broderick — who voiced Simba — admitted he was initially confused about his role. “I thought he meant Kimba, who was a white lion in a cartoon when I was a little kid,” Broderick had said in a 1994 interview about his casting.
Also pic related shows a screenshot from an early presentation reel of "The Lion King" which shows a white lion cub and a butterfly.
There is nothing wrong with remaking previous works of art.
Most Pixar movies have been rip-offs of other movies.
Toy Story : The Christmas Toy
Toy Story 2 : Follow That Bird
Toy Story 3 : The Brave Little Toaster
Bugs Life : Insektors + Seven Samurai
Ratatouille : Mouse Hunt
Cars : Doc Hollywood
Cars 2 : The Man Who Knew Too Little
Brave : Brother Bear
Monsters Inc. : Little Monsters
Monsters University : Revenge of the Nerds
Up : Above Then Beyond
Wall-E : Idiocracy + Short Circuit
Finding Dory : Toy Story 2
The Good Dinosaur : Lion King
" People remake good movies, but they are already good. They should remake bad movies that are good ideas but poorly executed." - Ed Catmull
youtube.com
Dude, calm down. I don't even care about the outcome of either case. I think both movies are different enough from the properties they are supposedly copying that Disney seems reasonably legally safe.
I just think that you have to have some conspiracy theory levels of denial to reject the very idea that Lion King was at least inspired by Kimba, that's all. I think there's at least room for agreement there. As for Zootopia, I don't know much about this whole thing and don't really care.
This is what you call a nuisance lawsuit. Not news worthy and not a good idea to raise one against Disney.
Hello Aku.
>implying you can beat the mouse
I don't think this is going to go anywhere. Not with big ol' Disney.
Hopefully they wouldn't have done the same stupid shit like they did in early Lion King production with Kimba.
Quit spreading misinformation for memes
well, tezuka is dead and was a japanese, those two are enough resons to drop everything, also aparently he gave Disney the concept but not the rights over kimba, he was a sucker for Disney and would never try anything against them.
>new lingo
Just because all of you don't read and weren't exposed to the term until a website was made about it, doesn't mean it hasn't been there is critical literature forever.
Both zootopia concepts were not even that creative to begin with