With rain threatening, I took the twins to see "Barnyard: The Original Party Animals" early yesterday afternoon:  It's not bad as far as animated, talking-animal coming-of-age movies go (the first observer here feels it's little more than "The Lion King" in a rural setting), but what caught my eye from the very first and distracted me throughout is that the main characters -- Ben and his son, Otis -- are male cows with udders.

I'm no sodbuster, and even I know that male cows, as it were, are called bulls (steers when they're neutered) and don't have udders (teats).

Many critics have noted this oddity, at least in passing. Carina Chocano of the LA Times wrote:

I understand that realism is not the main goal in an animated movie about anthropomorphized farm animals, but, seriously, what's with the male cows in "Barnyard"? Did the bovine gender confusion at the heart of the story give no one pause at Paramount or Nickelodeon?  ....all I can say for sure is that in writer-director Steve Oedekerk's bizarre computer-animated universe, "female cows" are required to wear hair accessories in order to differentiate themselves from "male cows," with whom they unaccountably share secondary sex characteristics.... (all are)  in unfortunate possession of protuberant udders that look like rubber toilet plungers with four wobbly cocktail weenies attached.

Our Michael Phillips wrote,

The real news about "Barnyard" is that its male "cows" (no such thing; cows are female) are running around with guy udders. Outrage is running rampant on the Internet Movie Database... A representative comment found on the site's "Barnyard" thread: "I can put up with plenty in movies but putting udders on bulls just ain't right." Or: "It just makes me think that the people making the film are morons and it bothers me far more than cars with tongues for example." So it won't be held up as farm-savvy in any respect at a 4-H meeting.

Little tiny horns and a smooth undercarriage would have said "bull," no problem.  And it's hard to believe that this suggestion wasn't made and adopted early in the production process.

Either you are of the "Fine with me. Fantasies are supposed to violate nearly every law of nature and physics" school of thought, or you are of the "I object! Even fantasies should to conform to a consistent internal logic" school of thought. (Cast your vote now)

I'm in the latter camp. The animals in this romp can talk, drive, play musical instruments and on and on. That's fine. We suspend disbelief because these abilities and characteristics are necessary to drive the plot or at least consistent with the other abilities of the characters.

But the udders on bulls are weird, unnecessary and therefore jarring -- think of, say, the Harry Potter character wearing a ballerina costume throughout the Potter movies for no apparent reason. 

Just because it's make-believe doesn't mean it gets to be udderly absurd.

Your poll needs an option C: Udder.

ZORN REPLY: Ba-dump-bump!

Harry Potter in a tutu would make more sense than bulls with udders. How do we know what he's wearing under that invisible cloak of his?

Thanks for this posting. I was udderly dismayed when sitting through this movie with my kids, 8 and 11. The 11-year-old saw the problem without my saying a word. What's wrong with Hollywood? This is discrimination against bulls!

This reminds me of focus-group research a friend has done with 8 year old boys to determine how accurate depictions have to be in video games. The one I remember her describing was about football teams -- did the NFL uniforms have to look exactly as they are, for example.

The answer: No - young boys knew very little about football beyond it is a lot of running and shoving. The uniforms had to be the right color scheme but that was all they would notice, if that.

I'm wondering if farm animals don't fall under the same category of oblivion.

What country was the animation done in?
Much animation is done in Korea & they often make mistakes that have to be corrected.
A classic [possibly apocryphal] one was that the school bus on the Simpsons was blue, because Korean school buses are blue. They had to change it to yellow.
Maybe the producers were just too cheap to send it back for corrections!

ZORN REPLY -- My brother-in-law Jeff McGrath is a Hollywood animator and, yes, while the bulk of the work is done overseas now (by people who can't get jobs at the Tribune's newly outsourced customer service phone bank, I guess) the storyboards and broad detail work is done right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. The Simpson's story sounds like an urban legend, as I doubt very much that the producers leave things like color up to chance at their sweatshops.

I'm willing to let movies take lots of liberties with fact & plausibility. But having male cows with udders just seems sloppy.

Maybe they're on hormones pending gender reassignment surgery?

Same thing on the Cows With Guns video--the males there have udders (are udderly udderly) too. (If you haven't seen this, it's very funny and worth a link.)
//http://www.3dweb.no/galleri/stuestolbm/bilder/anim1.swf

Coincidentally, I just watched a French movie called Code Unknown, in the course of which a French farmer shoots his cows--except the subtitles refers to them as bulls.

I can see right through you, Eric. This post was all just a setup for that awful pun!

Colbert did a bit about this, maybe a month ago, disturbed by the notion of a kid's movie about transsexual bovines. :)

ZORN REPLY -- Yes, but that was just on cable TV.

Off the topic here, Eric, but don't you know that you shouldn't call your children the "twins?"

ZORN REPLY -- OK, I'll bite. Why?

I read a story on this some time ago and they said the studio realized its mistake too late and decided it would be too expensive to fix it.

too much phthalate exposure maybe?

I know this doesn't relate to the story here but... Have you ever been to the annual Twins Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio? What an eye opener. I have spoken to many sets of twins there. When you ask them what their parents did right or wrong in raising them, the surprising answer to the "wrong" part is that they had to share a birthday cake. Twins are individuals too and you should help the world see them as more than just part of a matched set. I don't know if your twins are identical or fraternal, but I know that identical twins get really tired of people not knowing their names or when people get the name wrong and are corrected, they say "Whatever." They may come as a package, but they are definately two different people. (I know I overreacted to your comment about taking the "twins" to the movies, but...)

ZORN REPLY -- Ours are a boy/girl set so we don't worry too much about them lacking a sense of individual identity. I refer to "the twins" as a subset of the family as I would refer to "the kids," and in this case I didn't take "the kids" because Alex, who will be 17 in a few months, declined the offer.