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Pixar/Disney in "Monsters Inc" Ownership Scuffle
blamanj writes "According to a SF Chronicle story this morning, Pixar has been sued by artist Stanley Mouse. Mouse created a movie treatment titled "Excuse My Dust", which was set in "Monster City," where the animated monster characters worked for the "Monster Corporation of America." One of the characters was a a green, wisecracking, ambulatory eyeball. Furthermore, the lawsuit claims that a story artist from Pixar visited Mouse in 2000, and discussed Mouse's work."
Nothing new here. Disney has been stealing stories for years. For example, both The Lion King and Atlantis were ripped off from Japanese Anime. In fact both were ripped off from the same Japanese studio, which pretty much said "we can't sue, Disney has enough money to keep us in court until we're dead".
Now they rip off this guy without even acknowledging his work. It's pitiful. It's just awful what greed can do to people.
The saddest thing is that Disney hasn't had an original idea since before Walt was iced.
-- This sig for rent.
this one
You mean this episode. But here's a real-life example.
These animated movies take quite a while to write, design the characters, record the dialog tracks, and do the animation. Given that it was released in 2001, the movie was well under way in 2000.
In fact, according to IMDB, the movie had a working title of Hidden City in 1999. And I'd venture to guess the project started even before that.
Stanley Mouse has got to be one of the best album cover artists. Back in the days of records he did covers for Journey, The Grateful Dead and Steve Miller among others.
It's a shame now that the packaging for CD's generally is pretty boring.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
walt disney is not frozen. urban myth.
you are right, however about disney's inability to create new ideas.
If you read the article, you'll see that some of Mouse's prior art dates back to the 1960's:
Drawings attached to the complaint, dating from the early 1960s, pair a small, two-legged eyeball with a large, dull-witted monster character in a "buddy" relationship. The lawsuit claims that Disney and Pixar also appropriated the "buddy" relationship theme from Mouse's work.
Unless Disney has been working on this story for 40 years, I think Stanley Mouse has a case.
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
Sounds bogus.
Pixar had to have been producing the film before Sept 2000 as the sample on the Toy Story 2 DVD was on there.
Second, why did he wait so long? So, he can grab a huge sum of cash? Judges get suspicious when people wait so long to sue and with good reason.
FYI, Disney didn't make the move. It was all Pixar's doing.
It is not so uncommon for someone to look at something and think nothing of it, forget it, then sometime later remember it but in terms of it being some idea they came up with. Forgetting where they first saw it.
It is called Innocent Plagerism. And although it is still wrong, this common human error of doing such, especially when you are probably seeing a number of such ideas and script or treatments, is taken into consideration. It may not stop restitution but can help draw the line between criminal intent and innocent error. And that can mean alot to the one in error, such as respect,...
One of the methods of copyright takes such possibilities into consideration. Thru the writers guild you can copyright such work and it is filed away without anybody seeing the content. The only way to bring it out as proof is by court order. This helps to serve establishing ownership prior to anyone seeing the work.
Note the apparent lack of such a mechanism in regards to the Patent office. Something about timeline of what is done and published and the amount of potential time another has to come along and claim a patent to it. Of course there is the fundamental issue of inventor/authorship of patent subject matter.
Oh wait, the application of copyright methods can address that problem, in regards to proving inventorship/authorship/etc..
Just a bit of a pet peeve. 'Simba' is the Swahilli word for for Lion. I lived in East Africa for 6 years of my childhood. When I saw I 'Lion King' the first time it bugged me so much I hated it. Disney was so unoriginal that they named their lion 'Lion'.
... how fitting. /disney rant
Just a bit of a tidbit, the mongoose 'Rafiki' means friends which was somewhat interesting. And when the wise monkey is running across the plains to find Simba and singing 'Asante sana, squashed banana' -- Asante sana means 'thank you very much' and it always made me wonder what the Disney people were smoking when they came up with that.
But hey they are Disney, the company notorious for coming up with a bad idea and then running it into the ground by making movie after movie with the same stupid junior-high themes ('Air Bud' anyone?).
Now it seems that their stupid ideas aren't even their own
The Anti-Blog
Gums was played by J.E. Jones...
Bleeding Gums Murphy was played by Ron Taylor, not James Earl Jones.
Founder, Americans Allied Against Alliteration
The story is broadly similar, and then look at the character designs. It's like they hired Gainax to do them or something. They look remarkably similar, and they are almost 1-to-1 with the cast of Nadia.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Actually, when I first saw Treasure Planet I immediately thought of The Swords of the Swashbucklers, a graphic novel/comic series for Marvel Comics back in the mid-1980's.
Of course, let's not forget that this a science-fantasy adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel...
Jay (=
If the above article is indeed factual, the irony presented is simply amazing. Here Disney is, along with the big movie buisness, lobbying for laws that stop consumers from performing the same act performed here.
Pixar is being sued, not Disney. Disney is and always has been little more than a distributor for Pixar's movies. They offer minimal creative input on the stories and take a chunk of the money from the resultant toy market, but that's about the limit of Disney's involvement in things.
The difference is easy to remember if you adhere to the following formula: 100% of Pixar's current output is great, while 95% of Disney's current output is crap.*
(* "Lilo & Stitch" is the notable exception, which is funny because the more I watch it, the more it reminds me of a Pixar film instead of a Disney one.)