A Brief Note On The Snowman And The Frozen Teaser Trailer

In March 2014, Kelly Wilson, the creator of the 2D-animated short film The Snowman, accused Disney for copying a substantial fragment of her short film and used it for the Frozen teaser trailer. Made between 2008-2010, Wilson owns the exclusive copyrights to The Snowman and has never licensed or authorised Disney to copy, publish or advertise her short film.

In Wilson’s short film The Snowman, it is about a snowman who competes with a small group of rabbits to recover his carrot nose on slippery ice and the dispute ends with the rabbits returning the snowman’s carrot nose in an act of kindness. Similarly, in Disney’s teaser trailer for Frozen, Olaf the snowman competes with Sven the reindeer to retrieve Olaf’s carrot nose on slippery ice and ends with Sven returning the carrot nose. Other than having the same plotline, both works also have the same characters as both focusses on a snowman and wild animals. Both The Snowman and the Frozen teaser trailer also share the same setting and scene, being set in a winter landscape with slippery ice, and both

Gardner (2014), writing for The Hollywood Reporter, states that one of Disney’s earlier attempts to end the lawsuit was by referencing to a past copyright infringement lawsuit case between Funky Film’s The Funk Parlor and HBO’s Six Feet Under. This old lawsuit describes how “both works began with the same premise of a family-run funeral home confronting the unexpected death of the father”. But in the end, the court concluded that both works were not considerably similar to one another. Disney believes Wilson’s lawsuit is equally the same. However, Gardner’s (2014) article reveals that this attempt by Disney failed to have the lawsuit dismissed as California federal judge Vince Chhabria notes that: "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