I used to love A Bug’s Life when I was a child, despite the movie had so many bugs in it, pun intended.

I now am fully capable of realizing having a male hero for an ant movie is both scientifically and socioculturally bizarre. That said, the scientific inaccuracies never even remotely negatively affected my understanding of insects nor my scientific career.

Making movies is different from writing scientific papers. Credibility and reproducibility are the most important things for scientific papers, but being scientifically accurate is not the most important aim for movies. Telling a good story is. (Though, many also believe telling a good story is also the most thing for scientific papers.)

Therefore, a movie scientific consultant’s main function is not to dictate the storytelling by enforcing the education of scientific knowledge, but to comprehensively provide all relevant knowledge so the filmmakers can use the information to improve the storytelling.

In addition, as a scientist myself, I also see serving as a movie scientific consultant a good collaboration opportunity. The movie industry has no responsibility to promote the scientists’ achievements, but by being a consultant, I’ll be able to identify great opportunities to promote scientific advances.

Interestingly, I did some research and found out that A Bug’s Life actually had a scientific consultant, Prof. Robert Full at UC Berkeley, who is an integrative biologist and videotaped insect motions for the filmmakers’ reference.

Reference:

https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/09/rfull/fullstory.html