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

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, willing suspension of disbelief is required in just about any kids movie. I actually wanted to recommend "Over the Hedge" because it's a really fun flick with great animation, but I was afraid the anthropomorphized critters would drive you nuts. Really for all their lack of animal behavior, they might as well be gnomes. There's some great commentary on humans and suburban living you would enjoy. I'm particularly fond of RJ's speech about humans being food obsessed.

Ants is kind of painful. They aren't ants, they're a metaphor for American society, and a weak one at that. A Bugs Life is much more enjoyable, but they still aren't ants. Curiously, it shares a lot of themes with Clan Apis, but The science is much better in the latter.

In general if you know a lot about the movies subject, you have to cut them some major slack if you want to have any chance to enjoy it. I like CSI and I've enjoyed every one of the two dozen or so episodes I've watched, but I'm constantly thinking "That's not Las Vegas, that's LA." "Where in the hell do they think there's a quiet jogging path in forest abutting a suburb?" and "Cellar? there's maybe three cellars in the whole damn valley." The last episode I saw involved a clown and the parts they got wrong really annoyed me because they were major plot points that couldn't happen here. There are no street performers. There is no clown central casting agency where bored clowns sit around the office in full outfit and make up. There are talent agencies, but the talent almost never has to go to the office. I've worked with talent agencies for 12 years or so (as a caricature artist, no big shoes and rubber nose for me) and I've been inside one of there offices only four or five times to pick up a check or sign a contract. There's no "Tranny town" where people wander around in full make up trolling for Johns. The hookers we have wandering around are major crackheads who don't even realize they're dying of heatstroke. The attractive hookers and the specialty hookers work for illegal out call services which advertise in the Yellow Pages.

Um, the point here, before I headed off on that rant is that expecting hard science in a kids flick is unrealistic. If it happens, enjoy it, and let the rest of us know what it is so we can check it out.

[klandaghicat.livejournal.com]

I still haven't seen Over The Hedge. Ok, I really want to see it! The kid saw it and loved it... and it has a skunk! (I really do like seeing skunks in movies)
While in NC recently, I saw a clown in full make-up, sans wig, driving down the interstate, in a mini-van doing 20 miles under the speed limit. I was screaming, "Clown, clown!" in the same voice reserved for interstate wildlife sitings or fresh road-kill 'possum.

[(Anonymous)]

Right, a clown in full make up driving somewhere makes perfect sense. They're supposed to show up to most gigs all clowned up and ready to go. They can throw the wig on when they get there, because it's hot and it scrapes the roof of most cars. That's a sight I see with some regularity, since we're often on the way to the same gig.

I've also seen clowns and on one particularly ugly occasion, Santa, playing the slots. Like Thompson said, "Las Vegas is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

[klandaghicat.livejournal.com]

It does make sense, I agree. But actually seeing it... It's something I haven't seen before. Also it was halfway between two cities, about an hour apart.

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed "Over the Hedge" but I kept up a pretty steady commentary in my head about critter behavior. Yeah, regarding them as gnomes or elves or something neither animal nor human would make it easier.

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

I actually saw it again tonight and if possible enjoyed it more. They're a funny little bunch of gnomes.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

There's a series of Wizard-In-The-Modern-World books out there that drives me nuts for those same reasons, because it's set in Chicago.

I grew up here. I suspect the author is either asking vague questions of local informants, or lived here for a few years.

The protagonist lives in a neighborhood of wood-frame Victorian houses well within the city proper that are all on limestone bedrock secure enough for him to have tunneled out a sub-basement level beneath his basement apartment.

1. There are no wood-frame houses in Chicago. They were outlawed in the late 1800s. We had this fire, y'see ...
   
2. Points for knowing Chicago's on limestone. However, it's generally about forty feet down. Under the sand and sludge.
   
3. Basement apartments are highly illegal, too.

Et multi alia. ARRRRRGH. Plus the 'get on Highway A, go a long way east, change highways, end up somewhere that seems SO REASONABLE when all you know about it is the map ...' problem.

I kind of like the *plots* and *characters*, but every time the damn guy goes anywhere I have to put my fingers in my ears and go lalalalala while skimming or he drives me buggy.

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suspect it's particularly bad for places that have become more or less mythic, like Chicago, New York and Las Vegas. Writers don't feel like they have to do the research because they already know all about those places from previous books and TV shows.

Okay, one more. There's a really ridiculous Clint Eastwood movie called "The Gauntlet" in which Clint has to transport a prisoner form Las Vegas to Pheonix. They cross the border from Nevada to Arizona in the middle of a flat desert. Look at a map. That border is the Colorado river. They actually filmed a bunch of it here and they couldn't get that straight. The killer part is, that it could have made a great plot point, because there are only two places to cross the river into Arizona, so the bad guys could have simply set up camp at those two places.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

It's particularly galling because there are a lot of local shibboleths that he gets *right* -- slang terms for neighborhoods, stuff that you don't pick up from just having rented an apartment in Andersenville for two years. And then he'll have a vibrant Puerto Rican community ten minutes from the airport. ARRRRGH.

Names withheld to protect the guilty. :->

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

And off I went to look up the meaning of Shibboleth. Thanks, I don't get exposed to many new words anymore. I like it.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

And it's *biblical*.

*pious look*

*giggle*