Zootopia

Being a litigator means acquiring expertise in random subjects—ball bearings. Medicare billing codes. Gas-powered refrigerators. Fusion proteins.

But if you’re Daniel Petrocelli, the list also includes the animated Disney movie “Zootopia.”

Which is why I suspect it was child’s play for Petrocelli and his O’Melveny & Myers colleagues Craig Bloom, Drew Breuder and Anton Metlitsky to get yet another suit by an unhappy screenwriter claiming Disney stole their idea for the film quickly dismissed.

Because—news flash—the concept of anthropomorphic, crime-solving animals is not exactly original.

Think Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry, McGruff the Crime Dog, the Great Mouse Detective and Duckman—and none of those are what you’d call fresh offerings. 

Nonetheless, author and screenwriter Brian Hoff and his company, Furrywood Studios, sued Disney in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California earlier this year (the case was removed from Riverside County Superior Court) for copyright infringement. Represented by the Encore Law Group and Foley Bezek Behle & Curtis, Hoff claimed Disney ripped off his idea for a movie called Secret Agent 00K9.

“In June 2007, plaintiff pitched the idea of the Animal Metropolis concept with a K-9 lead character in an animal-human fantasy world where the lead character teams up with other 3 animals to solve crimes,” Hoff wrote in his complaint. 

Hoff said he had “numerous contacts with defendants regarding the screenplay and characters,” even allowing Disney access to his secure website to review all materials.

Disney declined to make his movie, and in 2016 released Zootopia—which grossed more than $1 billion worldwide.

Hoff includes a long list of supposed plot similarities between his movie and Zootopia—which also sound like plot similarities to roughly a zillion other films. 

As in: “Both films feature science specialist characters with lab coats and clipboards in high tech fortresses.” Also, both films have mysterious islands, dangerous chemicals, news anchors doing interviews, large police officers, cars with tinted windows, women with guns and main characters who are betrayed by people they trust.

In other words, every spy or crime thriller ever.

But if anything, Hoff’s own complaint undermined his allegations of copying. 

The complaint describes Zootopia’s plot as revolving “around the investigation by anthropomorphic animals (a rabbit and a fox) of a missing animal predator. The film’s plot leads to a poisonous neurotoxin that is used by the villain to make predators appear to go ‘savage’, with the intended result of causing the prey animals to revolt and gain control over the predator animals, threatening the livelihoods of many animals.”

“Similarly,” he continues, “the plot and themes of Secret Agent 00K9 also revolve around the investigation by anthropomorphic animals (a dog) of a missing jewel. The Secret Agent 00K9 story leads to a deadly gas that could wipe out all animals, threatening the lives of many.”

So … that’s not at all alike. It’s actually quite different.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford seemed to have little trouble dismissing the suit with prejudice, ruling that Hoff failed to show substantial similarity between the works.

“[T]he overarching storylines involved in 00K9 and Zootopia are very different. Sure, both plots rely entirely on crime-fighting anthropomorphic animals to portray the underlying stories. But the concept of anthropomorphic animals—even anthropomorphic animals who fight crime—is a high-level, basic plot idea not subject to copyright protection,” Guilford wrote. “Ruling otherwise would have the peculiar result of giving plaintiff a monopoly over all animated films involving crime-fighting, talking animals.”

The judge was also unpersuaded that the main characters were similar. 

“Plaintiff compares Agent 00K9 to Zootopia’s Nick Wilde. Plaintiff says the two characters are substantially similar because both are canines that ‘walk upright’, ‘speak with human ease,’ ‘wear human clothes,’ ‘confront human issues,’ ‘have human jobs,’ ‘solve crime with their human features,’ and have similar appearances, stances, attitudes, and mannerisms,” Guilford wrote. 

“But most of these alleged similarities describe anthropomorphic animals in general,” he concluded. Not to mention “Agent 00K9 is a dog and Nick Wilde is a fox, and their appearances very obviously reflect this reality.”

Hoff’s lawyer, Justin Karczag of the Encore Law Group, said in an email that “Mr. Hoff is reviewing his appellate options.”

Good luck. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently rejected another Zootopia copyright suit which appears to have much stronger claims.

Petrocelli defended Disney in that case as well, which was brought by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan’s Jeffrey McFarland on behalf of well-known Hollywood writer, director, and producer Gary L. Goldman, whose credits include Total Recall, Minority Report and Big Trouble in Little China.

Goldman came up with the name “Zootopia”—which he envisioned as a franchise “based on an animated cartoon world that metaphorically explores life in America through the fictional setting of a diverse, modern, and civilized society of anthropomorphic animals.”

He wrote a synopsis and treatment of the first segment of the prospective franchise, a live-action film called Looney, and pitched Disney, sharing his character illustrations and ideas.

Some of the visual mock-ups of the characters are similar, especially the sloth (My hands-down favorite Zootopia scene is when the main characters visit the DMV, which is staffed entirely by sloths.) 

A snippet of dialog was also virtually identical. “You want to be an elephant when you grow up, you be an elephant,” a Zootopia character said, versus a line from Looney: “If you want to be an elephant, you can be an elephant.”

The stories are quite different though—Looney is about the rise and fall of Zeke, an eccentric animator. In 2017, U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald in the Central District of California found that the “Neither the plots nor the sequences of events in Disney’s Zootopia and Goldman’s contemplated Looney / ‘Zootopia’ franchise are similar.” 

He also determined the characters weren’t similar enough-looking either. “[W]hereas the Disney characters are typically cute and appealing, the Looney characters evoke a darker, seedier aesthetic.”

As for the copycat title? Too bad.

“The titles are identical,” the Ninth Circuit ruled in April, “but a title is unprotected as a matter of federal law.”