![]() They did, however, request that GoodTimes feature their company’s name prominently on the covers of their VHS tapes, to prevent any claims of false advertising. The judges were unconvinced: they ruled that artwork similarity wasn’t enough to make Disney’s case, especially since Disney’s VHS packaging varied from film to film. Disney’s lawyers made the argument that the GoodTimes videocassette covers were too similar to Disney’s, which was leading customers to be confused about what product they were actually purchasing. At this point, they were really starting to cheese the Disney executives off. That, of course, didn’t stop Disney from going all sue-happy, launching lawsuits in 19 against GoodTimes Entertainment, who in 1992 alone released their own versions of Aladdin, Thumbelina, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid. Lumiere and Cogsworth from Beauty and the Beast are Disney property, for example, but there’s nothing stopping some opportunistic animation studio from making another film based on the Beauty and the Beast folktale that just happens to look a lot like the Disney version. ![]() But here’s the thing: since so many of Disney’s films are based on fairy tales that have long since entered the public domain, they don’t have a legal claim to exclusive rights. Now, you may be asking yourself, how is this legal? Surely the Walt Disney Corporation, a famously litigious financial behemoth with a veritable army of lawyers ready and willing to take a bullet for the Almighty Mouse, would have sued the pants off these production companies before the ink was dry on their creepy look-alike marketing posters? Yeah, of course they did. ![]() Renegade Animation’s Puss in Boots: A Furry Tale, by contrast, had twelve people working on it for six months, and it cost less than $1 million to produce. Dreamworks’ Puss in Boots was made by a team of 300 people over the course of four years to the tune of $130 million. The number of people who are taken in by this ruse doesn’t need to be particularly high, because these movies are (and this can’t be stressed enough) incredibly cheaply made. Well-intentioned grandparents end up buying copies of Leo the Lion: King of the Jungle for their The Lion King-obsessed grandchildren. So when kids are high on Happy Feet, Tappy Toes from Dove Movies is waiting in the wings. (Their official line is that they’re merely providing new material in the same genre that kids already love, but at the time of reporting, there were approximately zero people who believed that.) All it really needs is to have a similar enough title and cover art so that when you release it direct-to-video, enough harried and sleep-deprived parents will confuse it for the real thing. Only you’re going to spend a fraction of the money of one of those major animation studios, because your movie doesn’t actually have to be good. The concept is simple: when you learn that Disney or Pixar or, heck, even Dreamworks is working on a new film, you spring into action. Extremely liberal in their artistic reappropriation of creative content and shameless in exactly how much to cross the line, the mockbuster is an objectively hilarious footnote on the history of animation that not even the great Disney corporation has figured out how to fully combat. But as animated films have become bigger and bigger money makers, they’ve sprung into an entire niche market of their own. ![]() Mockbusters have been around for ages: the impulse to churn out low quality copies of popular films to turn a quick profit is too much for any unscrupulous producer to resist. But at the same time, if you’re a Brazilian production company that has just released an animated film called Ratatoing about a rodent chef suspiciously close to the premiere of Ratatouille, Pixar’s probably not buying it. People will try to tell you that imitation is the highest form of flattery. ![]()
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