The use of a piece of performance capture software called Mova on such films as Beauty And The Beast has resulted in a fiddly court case for Disney.
Disney’s live-action remakes of its own catalogue of beloved animated films has largely found box office success, but the VFX technology that drives them is expensive and complicated.
For proof, look no further than a quite curious legal case swirling around Beauty And The Beast. One of the pieces of software used to create the detailed, lifelike facial animation seen in the 2017 film was called Mova Contour – a programme first used to eye-catching effect in David Fincher’s The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button in 2008.
Mova Contour has been used in numerous films since, with examples including Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man.
Among the studios that worked on Beauty And The Beast's numerous effects shots was Digital Domain 3.0, which in turn used Mova to help capture actor Dan Stevens’ performance and turn it into the hairy, convincingly expressive creature seen in the finished film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, however, DD3 allegedly used MOVA without permission – and as a result, Disney could be “liable for vicarious infringement.”
The whole case is immensely complicated, but the broad strokes are these: the company behind Mova Contour – simply called Mova LLC – was founded in 2004 by Steve Perlman, a veteran inventor whose gifts to the world include QuickTime. The trouble appeared to begin in 2015, when the effects house DD3 won a technical achievement award for its work on Guardians Of The Galaxy; Perlman was reportedly irked that DD3 was getting an award for work which used his Mova system, and later alleged that he had “never granted Digital Domain a licence” to use it in the first place.
A legal battle began, in which it was found that a company called Virtual Global Holdings had licenced the Mova system to DD3 without actually owning the rights. On Sunday 3rd December, a court ruled that DD3 could no longer use Perlman’s tech – which now leaves Disney in the firing line for allegedly “profiting off of DD3’s infringement.”
The case has already rumbled on for about six years, and it’s reported that the trial, which begins today (6th December 2023) will last a week. The case appears to hinge on whether or not Disney knew about DD3’s alleged infringement; for its part, Disney has argued that DD3 was but “one of four visual effects companies and over a hundred vendors” it used on Beauty And The Beast, and added that it used “over 20 different software tools other than Mova” to animate the title character’s face.
All of which goes to show: there’s a definite upside to using traditional makeup effects, like that 1980s TV series starring Ron Perlman as the Beast.
