Judge Denies Disney's Request to Dismiss FROZEN Trailer Copyright Lawsuit

According to The Hollywood Reporter, a federal judge has denied Disney's request to dismiss a law suit brought on in March by Kelly Wilson, the creator of a short 2D computer-animated film entitled The Snowman. According to the complaint, the teaser trailer to the animated hit film violated copyright laws.

California federal judge Vince Chhabria wrote in his decision, "The sequence of events in both works, from start to finish, is too parallel to conclude that no reasonable juror could find the works substantially similar."
In Wilson's animated short features "an average Joe snowman who must battle to save his carrot nose. While not the same storyline as Frozen's 'Olaf', the teaser trailer was not a full representation of the full-length movie.

Judge Chhabria ruled that both The Snowman and the Frozen trailer featured the following sequence of events:

"(i) a snowman loses his carrot nose; (ii) the nose slides out to the middle of a frozen pond; (iii) the snowman is on one side of the pond and an animal who covets the nose is on the other; (iv) the characters engage in a contest to get to the nose first; (v) the screen pans back and forth from the snowman to the animal, set to music, as they endeavor to get to the nose; (vi) the contest continues when the snowman and the animal arrive at the nose at the same time; (vii) the animal ends up with the nose, leaving the snowman (and the viewer) to wonder if the snowman's nose will become food for the animal; and (viii) in the end, the animal returns the nose to the snowman."

As a result, he deemed that a reasonable jury would be able to find that both films were beyond a "generic idea into artistic expression."

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Image: Facebook/FROZEN