The Wrap is reporting that Disney is being sued for plagiarism over the Pixar animated box office hit “Inside Out”.

The suit is being filed by Damon Pourshian, who insists that the story that he wrote back in 1999 as part of a script writing class, which was also called “Inside Out”, bares a lot of similarities with the Pixar animated movie.

Instead of emotions, his story consisted of body parts, such as the brain, the heart, the colon, the stomach and the bladder. Sounds more like a Universal movie.

From The Wrap:

Disney and Pixar have been hit with a lawsuit by a Canadian man who says that the hit film infringes on his copyright for a work bearing the same title, among numerous other similarities.

The suit, filed in federal court in California by Damon Pourshian on Monday, says that Pourshian wrote a script titled “Inside Out” in 1999 as part of a script-writing class and that the script was turned into a short film the following year.

According to the suit, the school where the work was created, Sheridan College, “has sent large numbers of its graduates to work at Disney and Pixar and is considered a ‘feeder’ school for Disney and Pixar.”

“When Mr. Pourshian saw Disney/Pixar’s ‘Inside Out,’ he noticed striking similarities between his work and that of Disney/Pixar,” the suit reads. “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.’”

The suit states that Pourshian’s script and film “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.”

According to the suit, Pourshian isn’t the only one who noticed the similarities between his short film and the animated hit.

The suit goes on to list numerous “striking similarities” between the two works.

“Even the titles of the two works are identical, stating concretely the theme of both works–the outside world of the protagonist and how that world is connected to the normally unseen inside world,” the suit reads. “Both works depict the details of how their protagonists’ inner worlds experience the outer world, and both do so by representing the driving forces of their protagonists’ behaviors as anthropomorphized, internal characters who are reacting to (and interacting with) the world outside.”

Joe Hogarty