Animated Movie Mistakes You Won't Be Able To Unsee

Animation is big business in Hollywood right now. The genre hit a new high in 2016, when a whopping 16 animated features were released, but when the market gets flooded, some movies inevitably fall by the wayside. The best animated features go that extra mile to immerse viewers, helping the audience forget that the characters they're investing in have been drawn in pencil or rendered with pixels (the giraffe in Disney's smash hit Zootopia had nine million individually animated hairs, for example). All of that hard work is so easily undone by a simple mistake, however, and they happen at the top level way more often than you'd think.

Many of the following films are considered all-time greats of animation, but true perfection is a rarity in Hollywood, even when the likes of Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks are involved. That being said, it's hard to be too critical of the talented individuals who worked so hard on these stunning movies, because the top animators have always been under pressure to make their work stand out from the crowd. Mistakes are unavoidable (especially when there's a large number of animators working together on a scene), but when you do actually notice one of these errors, it ends up becoming impossible to unsee.

Just one year before Toy Story changed animation forever, Disney released The Lion King theatrically. This truly memorable movie smashed previous records to become the highest grossing hand-drawn film of all time and went on to become the best-selling VHS ever. According to The Daily Beast, the House of Mouse didn't even have its best animators on the job, with the A-team all assigned to Pocahontas instead. The studio expected its historical epic to be the bigger of the two movies, but The Lion King (technically the first Disney animated feature not based on an existing property, though this is up for debate) proved far more popular with critics.

According to one anonymous animator (who describes themselves as an "ex-Disney inbetweener"), the studio had "little faith" in The Lion King and apparently showed early cuts of the film to young animators as "examples of how not to animate" (via Refinery29). The doubters were proven wrong upon release, but did they actually have a point? On top of the factual errors (anteaters are native to South America but a couple somehow make it into the African-set flick) there are some jarring mistakes from the animators in here, ones that really can't be excused. The "whites" of Simba's eye turn yellow in certain scenes, and Nala's eyes switch from blue to green at different points in the movie, too.

DreamWorks' big breakthrough Shrek wasn't afraid to lean heavily into the realm of toilet humor, and that was one of the things that made it such a huge hit for the studio. Shrek subverts the typical Disney tropes right from the get-go — the titular Ogre tears a page out of a fairy tale book and uses it as toilet paper in the very first shot, and the opening credits go on to establish that this isn't your typical hero.

Shrek bathes in mud, brushes his teeth with insect guts, and chows down on eyeballs as he revels in his solitude, happy to be living his life out of reach of the many fairy tale characters and creatures that inhabit this world. To make sure they all get the message, Shrek creates a "Beware Ogre" sign for his swamp, but did you ever notice the mistake here? When he's painting the sign, we can see from behind it that the top left corner is missing, but when he plants it in the ground and we see it from the front, it's the top right corner that's missing. We hate to be picky, but knowing your left from your right is pretty basic stuff, people.

With a glut of homemade animated titles to choose from every year, it's easy for Western audiences to neglect films made outside the States, but in doing so, we deprive ourselves of some truly great movies. America first started to recognize the genius of Japanese animator and director Hayao Miyazaki in 2003 when his anime masterpiece Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards — the only hand-drawn, non-English language movie to pick up an Oscar. This coming-of-age fantasy epic follows a ten-year-old girl named Chihiro who has to take on a job at a mysterious bathhouse in order to rescue her parents from the spirit world they've unwittingly entered.

Miyazaki is well-respected in the world of filmmaking, with his work having influenced numerous Hollywood big hitters. Guillermo del Toro once said that My Neighbor Totoro "moved him to tears" when he first saw it as a young adult. Spirited Away has always been Miyazaki's standout picture, however. It was named the second-best movie of the 21st century by The New York Times in 2017, and while we won't be disputing that today, we feel obliged to point out that — as brilliant as this movie undoubtedly is — it isn't flawless. In fact, one of the most iconic scenes (the stink demon sequence) has several mistakes in it, with brooms vanishing from sight and a rope disappearing right over Chihiro's shoulder.

Some criticized it for being a rehash of the Toy Story movies, but this colorful Disney hit wowed the majority of critics with its deft mixture of familiar Mouse House themes and joyful nostalgia. However, just like the '80s arcade games it features, Wreck-It Ralph comes with the odd glitch, and we're not talking about Vanellope's predicament. The plot centers around Ralph and his struggle to accept himself as a bad guy, which is what he was created to be. In the opening moments of the movie, Ralph explains his job within the game Fix-It Felix, Jr — essentially, he wrecks the game's single building and Felix (controlled by the player) is tasked with fixing it. This makes Felix a hero to the people of Niceland, while Ralph is vilified for being a hulking klutz.

We get a quick run-through of how the game works, with Ralph doing what he does best and wrecking the building only for Felix to come along with his dad's magic hammer and repair the damage in no time at all. He gets awarded with a medal, while Ralph gets tossed off the top of the building by the Nicelanders. If you look closely, there's something wrong with this scene. From a wide angle, we see that Ralph is standing right next to the ledge during the medal giving ceremony, yet in the close-up shot that follows he's now square in the middle, giving the residents of the apartment building enough room for a run-up.

It might have fallen well short of 2014's The Lego Movie in terms of box office returns, but The Lego Batman Movie still raked in a ton of cash globally, with receipts totaling almost $312 million. It was hailed as a "dizzyingly funny and beautifully animated" movie by Rotten Tomatoes critics, who were almost unanimous in their approval — the movie holds an impressive 90 percent rating on the Tomatometer. J. R. Jones of the Chicago Reader was among the 10 percent of critics who didn't enjoy the movie, claiming that many of its problems were simply masked by the breakneck speed at which it hurtles along.

"Unfortunately the filmmakers embrace a perpetual-motion ethic that prevents them from sticking with any idea for long," Jones said of the DC Lego flick. "This is Mad Max: Fury Road for five-year-olds." Some of the mistakes made by the animators get lost in the madness of the movie's many action set pieces, but when The Lego Batman Movie slows down, you do start to notice the cracks a little. During the scene in which Bruce Wayne talks candidly to the portrait of his dead parents, the pictures to either side change around between shots, and when Alfred spooks his master (getting karate-kicked into a piano for his trouble), the chair that was directly behind Batman somehow disappears. Either Wayne Manor is haunted, or somebody messed up on this one.