Disney is no stranger to lawsuits from people claiming the House of Mouse stole their idea. However, Pixar's Inside Out is now the basis for yet another lawsuit from another individual claiming they created Inside Out first. Damon Pourshian of Canada says that in 1999 he wrote a script called Inside Out as part of a class at Sheridan College that he believes was used to inspire Pixar's story of emotions.
Damon Pourshian's version of Inside Out isn't identical to the Pixar film. In the screenplay written by Pourshian, the story follows organs inside the body of a boy named Lewis, so it's not emotions that have been anthropomorphized but the Brain, Heart, Colon, Stomach, and Bladder. However, each organ has a distinct personality and reacts to Lewis' actions, as well as having some control over those actions, similar to the emotions in the Pixar movie.
The lawsuit claims that Sheridan College acts as a "feeder" school for both Disney and Pixar, as several of the college's alumni end up working there. Damon Pourshian believes that some of the students who were attending Sheridan at the same time he was, and went on to work at Pixar, and on Inside Out specifically, saw the short film that was produced based off his screenplay, thus his story influenced the feature film without crediting his work.
He claims that several of his friends from the school actually contacted him regarding the similarities between the two works, so this isn't simply one man's opinion, but several people who apparently noted the similarities between the two works.
Not only is this not the first lawsuit that Disney has been hit with over Inside Out, it's not even the second. Last year, a child development expert sued, claiming her concept, The Moodsters, which she had reportedly pitched to Disney more than once as a potential TV series, was used to create Inside Out. Her concept reportedly used similar emotions as the main characters of the series and even included some of the same color coding for the characters.
The Wrap also reports that just a few weeks ago Disney was served with another lawsuit by Nevada author Carla J. Masterson who wrote the book What's on the Other Side of the Rainbow, which also deals with emotions as characters.
Clearly, there are a lot of people who think Pixar stole their idea. Of course, the fact that multiple lawsuits are being brought by people who seem to have come up with similar ideas on their own, it seems it might be difficult to prove that people at Pixar didn't also come up with a similar idea independently. If any of the suits are able to show that Disney infringed on somebody else's copyright, you can be sure you'll hear about it on CinemaBlend.
