The Shape of Water movie poster. (Photo: Courtesy photo.)

A federal appeals court has revived a copyright suit against the filmmakers behind the Academy Award-winning movie "The Shape of Water."

In an unpublished decision issued Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court win for studio Fox Searchlight and MacMillan Publishers, which published a novelization of the film, in a case brought by the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Zindel, who claims that the film and the book infringe copyrighted elements of his father's play "Let Me Hear You Whisper."

The ruling is a win for Alex Kozinski, the former chief judge of the Ninth Circuit who represented the Zindel estate in the case.

"The decision was unanimous and clearly correct," Kozinski said in an email Monday. "We look forward to presenting our case to the jury, as happened in the LA Printex case, which the Court cites. The jury in that case found infringement after the Ninth Circuit reversed the district judge's grant of summary judgment. I expect the same will happen in this case," Kozinksi said.

Oral argument in the case last year marked the first time that Kozinski appeared before the court since his abrupt 2017 retirement amid numerous allegations of harassment by clerks and, in one case, a former judicial colleague.

Monday's decision reverses U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson's dismissal of the case on a motion to dismiss. The Central District of California judge found no substantial similarity between Zindel's play, a work often performed in middle and high schools featuring a female janitor who plots to save a dolphin from a medical testing facility, and the 'Shape of Water,' where a female janitor aims to help an Amazonian river god she falls in love with escape from a military lab. Anderson made his decision by comparing the works, without taking any evidence or holding oral argument.

In Monday's ruling, the unanimous panel, Ninth Circuit Judges Kim Wardlaw and Kenneth Lee and U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly of the Northern District of Illinois, sitting by designation found "at this stage, reasonable minds could differ" about whether the works were substantially similar.

"Though both works properly were presented to the district court, additional evidence, including expert testimony, would aid in the objective literary analysis needed to determine the extent and qualitative importance of the similarities that Zindel identified in the works' expressive elements, particularly the plausibly alleged shared plot sequence," the panel wrote.

Neither Jonathan Zavin of Loeb & Loeb, who represents the filmmakers, nor Davis Wright Tremaine's Kelli Sager, who represents MacMillan Publishers, responded to requests for comment Monday.