Disney and Pixar Sued for Third Time Over ‘Inside Out’

For the second time in a month, and the third time since the film’s release, Disney and Pixar are being sued over the Oscar-winning Inside Out, over claims that the idea was stolen.

According to The Wrap, a Canadian man named Damon Pourshian filed a lawsuit against Disney/Pixar in federal court in California on Monday. He claims that he wrote a script for a film called Inside Out while taking a script-writing class in 1999, and that it was turned into a short film a year later.

The lawsuit states that Sheridan College, the school where Pourshian took the class and wrote the script, “has sent large numbers of its graduates to work at Disney and Pixar and is considered a ‘feeder’ school for Disney and Pixar.” The suit goes on to explain that other students at the school now work at Disney and Pixar, leading to the theft of the idea.

“When Mr. Pourshian saw Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out, he noticed striking similarities between his work and that of Disney/Pixar,” the suit states. “Mr. Pourshian later learned of the many connections between his alma mater, Sheridan College, and both Disney and Pixar, including a number of students who were at Sheridan College at the time his short film was shown and went on to work on Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out.”

As the suit continues, it explains what Pourshian’s script and film were about, saying, “each tell the story of the reactions of a boy named Lewis to events in his everyday life, illustrated through anthropomorphized representations of his bodily organs that influence (and react to) his actions, as seen from the inside of Lewis’s body. Inside Out shows Lewis’s outside world as well as an interior world in which his organs react to the outside world and with each other. The first internal character we see is the personification of Lewis’s brain, who operates in a command center using a complicated control desk within Lewis’s body to command Lewis’s interactions with the outside world. Lewis’s internal characters–Brain, Heart, Colon, Stomach, and Bladder–communicate and squabble with each other. Each has distinct personality and influences Lewis’s actions in various ways.”

Earlier this month, Disney and Pixar were sued by author Carla J. Masterson, who claimed that the premise for Inside Out was stolen from her children’s books, “What’s on the Other Side of the Rainbow?” and The Secret of the Golden Mirror.”