Director targets Disney’s ‘Inside Out’ in copyright suit

A film director has filed a copyright lawsuit against entertainment companies Disney and Pixar after he noticed “striking similarities” between a short film he created at college and their 2015 animation film “ Inside Out”.

Canadian director Damon Pourshian filed the complaint at the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Monday, June 18.

The complaint also names some of Disney’s subsidiaries as defendants, including ABC.

According to the lawsuit, Pourshian created a script called “Inside Out” while at Sheridan College, Canada, where he enrolled in 1999. It was based on a concept he devised in high school, and “Inside Out” was developed into a short film and “widely shown on campus”, the complaint said.

Pourshian’s script and film “tell the story of the reactions of a boy named Lewis to events in his everyday life, illustrated through anthropomorphised representations of his bodily organs that influence (and react to) his actions, as seen from the inside of Lewis’s body”, the suit said.

The complaint said Disney’s 2015 animation film tells “the story of a young girl named Riley and her reaction to events in her everyday life, illustrated through anthropomorphised representations of her emotions”.

The Canadian director said he “noticed striking similarities between his work and that of Disney/Pixar” when he saw the animation film.

For example, the mood and pace are “substantially similar” and “the plotlines and sequence of events in both works match closely”, Pourshian argued.

“Even the titles of the two works are identical, stating concretely the theme of both works—the outside world of the protagonist and how that world is connected to the normally unseen inside world,” he added.

Pourshian said he “later learned of the many connections” between Sheridan College and Disney and Pixar. For example, he alleged that “a number of students” who attended Sheridan College at the time “Inside Out” was shown went on to work on Disney’s and Pixar’s “Inside Out”.

The suit said Disney and Pixar therefore had access to Pourshian’s work, and the “obvious similarities” between “Inside Out” and “Inside Out” brought the director to the conclusion that the film studios infringed his copyright.

As Pourshian is a Canadian citizen and his short film was made in Canada, the complaint noted that his “works are not US works”. However, Pourshian said he obtained copyright registration for “Inside Out” in June 2018 (registration number PAu003905011).

Pourshian has asked the court for damages, Disney’s profits from “Inside Out” attributable to the infringement, and attorneys’ fees. He also wants an order directing Disney to add his name to the credits of the animation film.

This is not the first copyright infringement suit to target Disney’s “Inside Out”.

Earlier this year, a complaint brought by a child development expert in California was dismissed after a court found that characters from her TV show were not eligible for copyright protection.

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