Bad Natural History

[urbpan]

Okay, so when you watch a movie with animals acting like people (you know, talking and such), you must suspend some of your disbelief. I'm okay with that--it has been this way since Aesop.

But these days the filmmakers are mixing in lots of actual Natural History with animals acting like people. For example the fish in "Finding Nemo" look (and to some degree behave) real, but they don't eat one another. In "Antz," there are both male and female worker ants. (This movie, which I am only halfway through, is the reason I'm posting. There's an awful lot that I could say, positive and negative about it, but I need to finish it, and I probably have to watch "A Bug's Life" for comparison, and the go see "The Ant Bully," too.) Even the bug scene in "King Kong," while exciting, is laughable from a Natural History standpoint (beyond even the bugs' great size--I'm talking behavior).

I want to know this, from you all:

At what point does faulty Natural History interfere with your enjoyment of a movie?

Comments

[phlogiston-5.livejournal.com]

One thing that bothers me a lot is seeing the wrong crops in the wrong geographic area for a given time period. For instance, as far as I know from multiple botany classes and personal reading, corn was domesticated in central Mexico from a grass called Teosinte, yet I repeatedly see it mentioned or grown in shows about ancient Greece or Egypt. I even saw a documentary about Egypt that said it was one of the crops grown along the Nile!

Another example of a misplaced plant...in the show Lost they frequently walk through fields containing the grass Andropogon virginicus, which is native to the eastern US. It is on the show because it is invasive in Hawaii, where it is filmed. Not many people probably pick this stuff out, so its not a huge deal or anything, its just something I notice. The misplaced crop plants piss me off though.

As far as animals/insects goes...I think something like an insect not having six legs, or someone referring to a spider as an insect, would irk me a bit. I can't pick out the inconsistencies in vertebrate morphology and behavior usually, so that doesn't end up being a problem. I have avoided A Bug's Life and Antz because I just don't want to spend the whole time being bothered by incorrect portrayals.

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

Are you sure they meant corn in the U.S. meaning of the word? The crop that is called corn in the U.S. is called maize elsewhere, and "corn" is a generic term for grain there.

[phlogiston-5.livejournal.com]

Well that is what I assumed they meant in the documentary at least (who knows what the other random shows meant in their use of the word). I just think it can be misleading for Americans if they are going to broadcast this stuff in the U.S, since to us, corn is definitely on the cob. It would be easier if they didn't generalize crops (I guess its kind of like a common name for a species potentially referring to two distinct or unrelated organisms).

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Well, it'd be easier if we Americans had just kept 'corn' as meaning 'any local cereal,' and been a bit more rigorous about calling our cobbed stuff 'maize', which is its proper name.

But that demands logic from masses of people, so. :->