Kenneth Giavara, a San Diego-based aspiring screenwriter, filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Mike White, Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures, claiming the 2023 animated film “Migration” was lifted from his screenplay, “South for the Winter,” which he wrote in 2007.
According to the complaint filed Friday in the Central District of California, Giavara alleges that, “Defendants brazenly have infringed upon and incorporated numerous [protectable] elements from ‘South for the Winter’ into ‘Migration,’ including plot, sequence, characters, theme, dialogue, mood and setting.”
Additionally, Giavara also alleges that the “similarities between the movie ‘Migration’ and ‘South for the Winter’ are so substantial that it seems unlikely that the former could possibly have been created independently from the latter.”
According to the complaint, both projects follow an anthropomorphic bird family in New England with an overprotective father, a kid who wants to see the world, a road trip migration that kicks off at a Central Park pond, an older mentor bird and a tropical finish. The father in Giavara’s script is named Mac. In “Migration,” he’s named Mack.
Giavara added he registered the screenplay with the WGA in 2007 and entered it into multiple contests, winning first place in the 2011 Fresh Voices competition, which he says resulted in his screenplay being “distributed to hundreds if not thousands of companies and persons in the movie industry in Hollywood.”
Giavara registered the screenplay with the U.S. Copyright Office in Dec. 2025. He is seeking damages, profits derived from “Migration” and a writer’s credit on the film.
This filing follows a separate, independently filed 2025 copyright lawsuit against the project that’s still active.
A rep for Universal declined to comment. Additionally, reps for Illumination and Mike White did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
