Franck Le Calvez is suing Disney and animation studios Pixar for copyright infringement and breach of trademark. The French children’s book author has told a Paris court that the main fish character in the Disney film Finding Nemo, which has so far grossed $850 million, was a direct copy of a character he created: a cheerful orange-and-white clown fish named Pierrot.
Franck Le Calvez is suing Disney and animation studios Pixar for copyright infringement and breach of trademark. The French children’s book author has told a Paris court that the main fish character in the Disney film Finding Nemo, which has so far grossed $850 million, was a direct copy of a character he created: a cheerful orange-and-white clown fish named Pierrot.Le Calvez says that he registered Pierrot the Clown Fish — both character and story — with the French authors’ copyright association in 1995. The story, like Disney’s movie, features a young fish separated from his family. Lawyers for Le Calvez said the first 30,000 copies of Pierrot the Clown Fish, published in November 2002, had sold out. But a second edition in October 2003 did not sell well … because bookshops did not want to stock it alongside Disney’s Finding Nemo books, they said.
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