Hollywood often shows animals doing things they would never do or living in places they would never live in nature. From tropical jungles to the skies, here are some examples of animal misrepresentation in movies and TV.
1. Bungle in the jungle: Kookaburras in the Amazon?
You’ve probably seen a jungle scene where a character treks through dense vegetation. Suddenly, a maniacal laughing sound echoes through the trees. Koo-ka-ka-ka, koo-ka-ka-ka. It gets louder: KOO-KA-KA-KA! Is it a monkey? Some predatory jungle beast? Nope! It’s the unmistakable call of the kookaburra, a large kingfisher bird native to Australia.
Sound designers love the laughing call of the kookaburra. They use this exotic sound to enhance jungle scenes set in South America, Africa, or Asia.
You can hear the cry of the kookaburra in just about any Tarzan movie. It also features in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and appeared in Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967) and many other movies.
2. My, what big ears you have: Do Asian elephants live in Africa?
Some early Tarzan movies and other old films set in Africa feature elephants. Oddly, the animal actors they used were not African elephants but Asian elephants. How can you tell? One way is that African elephants have larger ears than Asian elephants. To make Asian elephants look the part, sometimes ear extensions were attached to their ears! Sometimes fake tusks were attached too.
Filmmakers did this because Asian elephants were much more common as movie actors at the time than African elephants. In the 21st century, most movie elephant stars are created with CGI, like in Tim Burton’s Dumbo (2019).
3. The great bird call swap: Soar like an eagle, cry like a hawk
Have you ever seen a movie or a television show where a majestic bald eagle soars across the sky? Often, a magnificent cry reverberates over the landscape. But wait! The sound you hear is not that of the bald eagle on the screen but the cry of a red-tailed hawk.
Why? Because the bald eagle’s cry is a high-pitched squeak, whereas the red-tailed hawk has a majestic call, at least to the ear of the moviemakers. The bald eagle’s cry is a thing of beauty to its fellow bald eagles.
4. Shark shenanigans: Do sharks really do that?
In the Jaws movies, the great white sharks do all kinds of things that real great whites would not only never do but could not do! One of the Jaws movies shows a mother great white attacking the humans who took her baby. The reality is that once a great white shark is born, it is completely independent of mom. A mother great white would never know if her offspring was captured and taken to an aquarium.
In another Jaws movie, an attacking shark roars like a lion! In real life, sharks cannot roar. In fact, sharks cannot vocalize because they have no vocal cords.
In another scene, a great white chases down a speedboat going full speed at 40-50 miles (65-80 km) per hour. In real life, a great white can only swim half that fast, and then only for relatively short distances!
5. The case of the missing legs: An insect has 6 legs
In the Pixar movie A Bug’s Life (1998), a gang of mean grasshoppers bullies a colony of ants. The grasshoppers have six legs as real grasshoppers do. But the ants only have four legs, two legs short of real ants. All insects have 6 legs.
Why did the animators decide to steal two legs from each ant? Perhaps they wanted the ants to look more human so viewers would relate to them as the heroes of the movie. Perhaps it was easier to animate hundreds of 4-legged ants. What do you think?
Join the Hollywood Fauna Fraud Squad!
Next time you’re watching a movie or TV series, look and listen for evidence of animal misrepresentation. If you suspect fraud, feel free to reach out to our team of dedicated fauna fraud detectives.
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By David Brown
