Boo on DreamWorks

While the ratio of DreamWorks to Pixar movies that I have loved is certainly skewed a little more towards the latter, I’m not some rabid Pixar fanboy who hates on DreamWorks. While I was disappointed by MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, KUNG FU PANDA was fantastic. But this latest DreamWorks film in development sounds like a blatant ripoff of another animated film. The studio is prepping BOO U., a film about ghosts who go to school to learn to scare humans. When one of the ghosts begin to question his job, he’s sent back to school to get him back to scaring. Sound familiar?

There’s still a lot of acrimony between Pixar and DreamWorks heads John Lasseter and Jeffrey Katzenberg over the BUG’S LIFE/ANTZ debacle so I’m surprised that DreamWorks would even want to hew this closely to a previous Pixar film. The project isn’t due until late-2012 (assuming this apocalypse doesn’t crumble the globe first) and is only in the pitch phase so hopefully writer Jon Vitti (THE SIMPSONS MOVIE) and director Tony Leondis (IGOR) can do some work on the script to help separate it.

What do you think? Is it much ado about nothing? Or a ripoff?