I think it’s just standard Hollywood practice to mix-and-match animals from all over the world in one place regardless of ‘real world’ distribution. Have you ever seen a movie where a generic jungle had Central American toucans, Australian cockatoos, African white-backed vultures, etc, all in the same spot? A very common movie “goof”. Listen to the background noise at the beginning of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, supposedly taking place in Peru, and you can hear an Australian kookaburra. Hey, why not? It sounds cool.
I once read (don’t know if it was true) that it used to drive Roger Tory Peterson crazy to hear all the Californian bird species used on soundtracks for movies supposedly taking place in other parts of the world.
I think it’s supposed to be a Bluebird. No crest. If it is, though, it looks most like a Mountain Bluebird, and that clearing sure doesn’t look like anyplace around here!
Clearly the story is set in some distant (perhaps post-apocalyptic) future where animal and plant distributions are very different and some species show evidence of bioengineering. There, now it makes sense.
It’s a fairy tale: fiction for children. The illustration is about the idealized beauty and perfection of Nature, and is not meant as a lesson for junior biologists. Sheesh!
Are you saying we’re not allowed to have a laugh at how absurdly wrong they got it?
Last I checked, most of the good “fiction for children” had good life lessons included, maybe we should include a little proper taxonomy for the next generation.
Have been introduced in many parts of Europe (and according to Wikipedia Germany is home to the largest population outside of North America), so it would not be completely implausible to find them hanging out in a forest in Europe.
Of course, this would not have been the case in the pre-modern time in which the fairy tale is supposedly set. But fairy-tale films rarely strive for much consistency or historical accuracy in terms of clothing, architecture or any number of other things, so I would expect the selection of fauna to be equally fantastical.
