My daughter has quite a fertile imagination and since the age of about three, has told little stories about a character she invented - I won’t go into too much detail, but it’s a mouse.
So here we are, and she’s 11 - and the character is still the occasional subject of conversation - over the last couple of years, I’ve been helping her develop the main (and original) story thread concerning the character, with a view to publishing it as an illustrated children’s story book.
And we went to see Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille the other day… and the plot of that movie is strikingly similar to the story we’ve been playing with all these years and working on more recently. I don’t think there’s any way we could publish the story we had been preparing without it looking like blatant plagiarism. Worse, we don’t have any solid documentary evidence that we’ve worked on the idea as our own original creation.
So that’s it, right? Screwed. My daughter is crestfallen - the trouble also that the other stories we had in mind don’t work without this one as the introduction.
If her/your story has been around that long, I’d like to see where Bird got his ideas from.
Anyway, I don’t have any real advise, other than do what you can at this point to separate your ideas and stories from the movie. Was it set in Paris? Modern day? The mouse controls a wannabe chef as a proxy for it’s culinary skills? If all this is true to your story, I’d say it will be hard to make it not look like you ripped off the idea, since the latter idea is central to the plot. Otherwise, focus on the areas that make the story original and maybe even rework some of the plot?
I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but no, it’s not those kind of details - it’s more the fundamental motives, personalities and actions of the characters. It’s not exactly the same, but it has enough closely similar elements that I think most people would think ‘oh, this is quite a lot like Ratatouille’.
And unfortunately, it’s these elements that underpin the whole series of stories - I don’t think there’s any way to make it different enough without making it into something else altogether.
Then keep working it! The both of you have put so much work into it already, it’s characters you love and want to share… don’t worry about the similarities. Maybe create a foreword about the genesis of your story as to mitigate any criticism. But really, people love to hear good stories about charming characters that they can relate to. If it rings true, it’ll be a success. Besides, it’s obvious the both of you love doing this, so why stop now?
ETA: Besides you can always use the bulletproof argument: No, Ratatouille was about a rat. Ours is a mouse. Duh!
Ideas can’t be copyrighted. Think of all the stories about a boy who leaves home to fight a great evil (Star Wars, The Wheel of Time, etc.)
If your plan is to pay a self-publisher to have a few copies printed to pass out to friends and family, I wouldn’t worry about it anyway. No one but the people you contact are even going to know it exists.
If you’re attempting commercial publishing (i.e. she wants the book on store shelves), then that’s something else entirely. (The unofficial anecdotal evidence suggests it takes about four novels before a writer produces publishable material. And in that time, we rack up a *lot *of rejections.)
Granted, but ideas this specific will look like plagiarism, and Disney is a big company with expensive lawyers - so I think even if I could somewhat support the case that we came up with the idea as original, We’d still come off worse just because of the difficulty and expense of trying to assert it against the big guy.
The plan was actually to try to get it published - I know we might not have prevailed with that (I work in the publishing industry, although not in its publishing function) - it’s not as complex a work as a novel - it would have been a series of illustrated bedtime stories short enough for each to be read in a single sitting.
I realise I keep tapdancing around the details and this makes it hard to discuss meaningfully here - is there any way I can safely divulge the more precise nature of the story without compromising any rights I may still have? If I post it here, I grant TPTB a right to re-use it. If I put an outline up on my own site and link to it, am I risking anything?
Writers post their entire children’s stories for critique on the (password-protected) Share Your Work forum on the Absolute Write boards without fear of losing their publishing rights, and AW is filled with enough people who work in the industry (including writers with dozens of novel credits, agents, editors, and publishers) that if there were a problem, it would be pointed out there. We also discuss the synopses of our books, often in great detail.
I’m still not clear on what rights you think you’re giving up by posting what the book is about. If you’re worried that someone might reuse the idea, who cares if they do? It’s the execution of the idea that makes one writer’s work different from another’s.
I just remembered something. IIRC, toadspittle illustrates his sister’s award-winning children’s stories. It might be worth a PM to him to see if he shares any of your concerns.
Something happened last night that snapped me into a brand new perspective - and I’ve worked out an outline for a new plot that is perfectly in keeping with the character concepts, but is quite different from the one that appeared to resemble Ratatouille. We’re back in business, I think.
