15 Mind-Blowing Mistakes You Completely Missed In Disney Movies

Although most moviegoers don’t think about it, it takes a lot to put together a big-budget movie. When it comes to Disney movies, there are a lot of decision-makers involved in the process even before production begins, but as the movie progresses, there are also hundreds of people working behind the scenes to make sure that all the details are correct. But because there is just so much to keep up with, a lot of little details in films end up falling through the cracks.

From animated movies to live-action features, all the cogs and wheels that make a movie perfectly whole don’t always end up going where they need to be. This means that sometimes character’s costumes change from one scene to the other, or that there are continuity errors in where characters are standing. Sometimes changes made post-production mean that other elements in the film become wrong (and forgotten) and sometimes, the director really didn’t notice how the cameras or boom microphones added a shadow in a scene until it’s too late.

Disney is no stranger to movie mistakes, and some of those mistakes are glaringly obvious once moviegoers see them.

Here are 15 Mind-Blowing Mistakes You Completely Missed In Disney Movies.

15. FINDING DORY: SALTWATER FISH JUST KEEP SWIMMING IN FRESH WATER

Disney is usually really good about researching the animals it ends up putting in its movies, especially those movies that feature animals as the main characters. But sometimes, little details escape the writers and animators and those animals end up in situations that are completely unrealistic (at least as far as movies about talking animals go).

One of those details missed in Finding Dory, is that throughout the movie, Dory and her friends often end up in fresh water. There’s just one huge problem with that: Dory and her friends are all saltwater fish. Fresh water would kill the motley crew of sea creatures.

Even worse, there’s a scene where Dory lands in a mop bucket, which probably contains some sort of cleaning solution. That, too, would probably result in Dory’s death in the real world.

14. MOANA: THEY’RE ACTUALLY SAILING NORTH, NOT EAST

Moana broke ground as one of the first animated Disney movies with a lead female character who did not have a love interest. Instead, Moana went on to become a great adventurer, eventually leading her people to discover new worlds away from their own. But the movie wasn’t completely perfect.

After Moana and Maui go up against the Kakamora, Maui decides to join Moana on her quest. He tells her that they need to sail east, but he says that as the sun sets to his left, which is west. Then Moana navigates the boat straight ahead, which actually means it’s going north.

Perhaps catching that is just nitpicking, but it’s likely that Neil deGrasse Tyson would point out such an obvious disregard for directions in a film.

13. THE LITTLE MERMAID: ERIC’S DISAPPEARING OARS

One of the most romantic scenes in The Little Mermaid is when Eric takes Ariel for a boat ride on a beautiful lagoon. Eric rows the boat into the middle of the water just before Sebastian engages the local wildlife in a song, “Kiss The Girl”.

At the beginning of the song, Eric, obviously, holds a pair of oars – because someone has to row the boat. But as the song progresses, the oars disappear from his hands. They also don’t show up inside the boat. Did Eric just throw them overboard in a fit of passion because the song had him so focused on Ariel that he completely forgot what he was doing?

This is one of those movie mistakes that cannot be unseen.

12. SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES: DOC’S GHOSTLY HAND

It’s probably good to cut Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a little slack as it was the first animated feature film to ever get made. That means that artists and animators ended up doing a lot of experimenting to bring the story of the princess, her dwarf friends, and the Evil Queen to life. Perhaps it is no huge surprise that there are some bloopers in the animation.

For example, there’s a scene where Snow White is sleeping and Doc removes the bed covers. For just a few short seconds, ghost hands appear in several frames. Those ghost hands are actually where artists drew Doc’s hand in the wrong position for the scene, experimenting with exactly where it would go in the final frames.

11. HERCULES: MEG’S EYE COLOR CHANGES

Sometimes mistakes happen when movie creators decide to make changes after they are well into production. That’s why Hercules has such a glaring problem: Megara’s eye color changes from scene to scene. Usually, Meg’s eye color is purple, chosen to match her dress. But that was a decision made after animators had already begun to draw the movie. Before that, her eyes were blue.

Although it’s likely that Disney went back through its work to make sure her eyes ended up the right color, they missed a lot of frames. For example, when Meg sings “I Won’t Say (I’m In Love)”, she starts the song out with purple eyes, but they become blue, but then they become purple again. This happens all throughout the movie.

10. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (LIVE-ACTION): EAST WING IS REALLY THE WEST

Disney spent a lot of time and paid a lot of attention to detail to get the inside of Beast’s castle just right in the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast. Their hard work shows, but there is one little detail that the studio missed. Pay attention to how the sun rises and sets throughout the movie, as seen through the castle’s many windows.

As everyone knows, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so the west wing of the castle is where the sun sets and the east wing is where the sun rises. But in the movie, it’s just the opposite, meaning that Disney got the east and west mixed up when naming those two particular parts of the castle.

9. FINDING NEMO: THE BOAT TAKES OFF WITHOUT PULLING UP ANCHOR

At the beginning of Finding Nemo, Nemo’s school friends dare him to swim up and touch the bottom of the boat that’s sitting above them in the ocean. That boat clearly has its anchor thrown into the water, meaning that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Except that it does go somewhere: that boat fires up its engine and just sails away, all without ever actually pulling up its anchor (which is pretty impossible).

Of course, this is what starts Nemo’s big adventure as he gets lost in the sea and his father goes to look for him, but it’s still a pretty obvious mistake: a boat can’t move without pulling up its anchor first. Of course, at that point, Disney asks, “Anchor? What anchor?”

8. MULAN: THE MEDIC’S TENT HAS A JAPANESE FLAG INSTEAD OF A CHINESE FLAG

One might think that Disney would, at least, know its geography, especially for a movie specifically set in the country of China. And yet, in Mulan, Disney made a huge goof hat still hasn’t been fixed.

Everyone knows that Mulan is a movie set in China: at the time, that was actually a pretty big deal. So why would Disney’s artists and animators include the Japanese flag in scenes? That’s exactly what they did, too: in the scene where Mulan recovers in a medic’s tent, the tent has a gigantic Japanese flag on it. One of the characters in front of the tent also sports a Japanese flag as part of its outfit.

Considering that the two countries’ flags are vastly different, there really is no good excuse for that kind of obvious mistake.

7. ALADDIN: PALACE DOME GOES FROM BEING PERFECTLY ROUND TO OVAL

Sometimes movie mistakes turn up after someone in the production changes their mind about things. That was certainly the case with Meg’s eye color in Hercules, and is also the case in Aladdin, where it seems that animators decided that the domes on the castle in Agrabah would have more of an oval shape than originally intended. This becomes obvious when watching the movie.

During the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” the palace clearly has round-shaped domes on it. But in the rest of the film, it almost seems like those domes got stretched out because their shape is more oval. It’s not a detail that glares out at moviegoers, but it does seem that Disney somehow missed that it needed to change the shapes to oval in the intro.

6. CINDERELLA (LIVE-ACTION): THE LIZARD’S TONGUE INEXPLICABLY CHANGES SHAPE

Many critics and fans would consider Disney’s live-action Cinderella even better than the original animated feature. Disney paid such attention to detail, making sure that every bead and piece of lace on each costume was absolutely perfect in every single shot of the movie. But for some reason, the studio still missed one minor detail.

In the scene where the Fairy Godmother turns an ordinary garden lizard into Cinderella’s coachman, that lizard has a forked tongue. But a later scene, as Cinderella flees the castle party, the lizard coachman catches a fly with a tongue that looks completely different and it is definitely not forked. Perhaps it was magic that the lizard’s tongue changed when it became human, but more than likely, it was an overlooked mistake.

5. ALICE IN WONDERLAND (LIVE-ACTION): CAMERA SHADOWS

Tim Burton’s live-action Alice in Wonderland is a feast for the eyes: full of colors, glorious details and a wacky version of Wonderland that could only come from his particular kind of mind. Burton is also a stickler for details, but it seems that even some get by him in post-production. In one particular scene of that film, when the Mad Hatter explains to Alice how the Red Queen took over the White Queen’s kingdom, there are some weird shadows, including one that sort of moves around the edge of the frame. That shadow is from a camera as it circles the scene. Moviegoers who look down a little farther will also see the shadow of that cameraman’s legs, which completely takes one out of the magic of the moment.

4. THE LION KING: THE NUMBER OF TIMON’S STRIPES CHANGES

How many stripes does Timon from The Lion King have? The correct answer, according to most Disney trivia buffs, is five. But there are times in the movie where that sometimes changes. Sometimes it’s four. Other times it’s six.

It’s not evident if this is just a huge glaring mistake made by animators who couldn’t decide early on what Timon would look like or if it’s a matter of how the character moves around so much that no one really noticed it, but now moviegoers will watch “Hakuna Matata” over and over just to count the stripes (fortunately, they seem consistent in that musical number).

Maybe Pumbaa farted so hard once that one of Timon’s stripes fell off, but that still doesn’t explain how Timon occasionally gets a new stripe during the movie.

3. FANTASIA: MIXED-UP GREEK AND ROMAN DEITIES

Those who aren’t familiar with Greek and Roman mythology often get their gods and goddesses mixed up. Although the gods and goddesses are identical, they have different names in each culture. For example, the head of Mount Olympus and father to most of the other gods is Zeus in Greek mythology. In Roman mythology, his name is Jupiter. Dionysus is Greek for the god of wine and partying, but his Roman name is Bacchus.

Apparently, this confused Disney, too, because in the Fantasia segment “Pastoral Symphony,” the names of the gods are inconsistent: some go by their Greek names, while others go by their Roman names. The only one that is consistent is Apollo, but that’s because he has the same name in both cultures.

2. MONSTERS, INC.: INCONSISTENT TIME OF DAYS IN THE DOOR ROOM

In Monsters, Inc., there is a room full of nothing but doors that lead to children’s closets all over the world. How else are monsters to get around as they scare kids for a living, right?

But there’s a huge problem in one of the scenes with those doors. When Mike, Sulley, Boo and Randall are traversing the room, going in and out of doors like crazy, the time of day that the enter various countries in is wildly inconsistent. For example, while it is night in Florida, it’s day in Paris, Tokyo, and Hawaii. Anyone who knows anything about how time zones work knows that’s wrong. So what happened?

It’s likely that animators just forgot to do their research or that some of those cities got changed later on in production.

1. FROZEN: SUDDEN WIND AT THE TRADING POST

In Frozen, Anna ends up wandering over to the Wandering Oaken’s Trading Post. As she stops to stare up at the shop’s sign, there is no wind, no storm and everything is calm (although there is snow on the ground, so it’s probably cold). But then Anna opens up the door and goes inside, but as she walks into the building, there is suddenly a high wind, which actually slams the door shut behind her. The door slams so hard that it pushes her forward.

So was this some sort of magical storm that just happened to occur right as she opened the door? Or was this just a detail that Disney missed when they created the movie?

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Did you watch any of these mistakes? Let us know in the comments!