All owls hoot, all big cats roar, all bears growl the same way, all rodents (and rodent-looking animals) squeak, all monkeys and apes hoot and screech like chimpanzees, and all birds of prey scream like the red-tailed hawk (because a bald eagle's cry MUST be awesome). Except, in real life, they don't.
Animals have a variety of noises and even relatively closely related animals can sound completely different from one another. This applies even to animals within the same species — certain tiny dog breeds have deep barks because they're either sized-down versions of large dogs or they were bred for their bark (for example, beagles).
This is often due to mixing up species. Animals who look similar or belong in the same general family are assumed to sound alike, when in reality they don't. Common examples include foxes, wolves, and hyenas sounding like dogs, all big cats sounding like tigers, all big whales sounding like humpback whales, all seabirds sounding like herring gulls, zebras sounding like horses, and penguins sounding like ducks. Special mention must go to frogs. Only one type of frog goes "ribbit" — the Pacific tree frog; it lives in Hollywood. Go figure.
This trope often occurs due to Reality Is Unrealistic. An animal's real cry might not sound "powerful enough", so they're replaced with a "cooler" or "more appropriate" sounding cry. This is why monkeys are often given chimp calls and bald eagles are often given the cries of red-tailed hawks, and giving them their correct respective cries may be jarring for those conditioned to hear the replacements.
Animals making the wrong noises isn't specific to fictional works. Even some educational documentaries will re-dub animals' voices or add in incorrect noises because viewers expect animals to sound a certain way.
Note: Extinct/fantasy animals are exempt from this trope. While the example is likely correct, the point of this trope is to also showcase a real-life example. With extinct animals, there is no such thing.
Sub-Trope to Noisy Nature and Artistic License – Biology. Comedic, intentional examples go under Silly Animal Sound. Compare Misplaced Wildlife, with which this often overlaps — not only is the animal making the wrong noise, but it's in the wrong place, as well — along with its subtrope Jungles Sound Like Kookaburras. Related to The Coconut Effect.
Examples:
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Advertising
- In the "Green Sense" commercial, a starling's call is overdubbed with the far cuter, far less cacophonic robin's song.
- In one Axe hair gel commercial, a man (using a different hair gel) impales fish on his hair while cliff diving and is attacked by a seagull screeching like a hawk.
Anime & Manga
Fan Works
- Defied in Love Bites. Rainbow asked Fluttershy to make a "majestic eagle call" as an alarm, but Rarity tells her that she's thinking of a hawk's call. Immediately afterwards, Fluttershy makes a "squeaking sound like a very excited and feminine turkey", which is what bald eagles actually sound like.
Films — Animation
- The eponymous wolf from the Peter and the Wolf short in Make Mine Music can roar like a lion, with his first scene having him utter a Mighty Roar at the audience. An obvious example of Rule of Scary, since it’s pretty common knowledge that canines can’t roar.
- The Lion King:
- Hyenas in The Lion King (1994) often make dog noises, with the exception of the hooting laughter of the spotted hyena. Despite their physical resemblance and similar behavior to canines, hyenas belong to a family of their own, and their closest relatives are civets and genets. Ironically, as they belong to the Feliformia suborder, this also makes Hyenas related to cats!
- Lion characters purr in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride. Lions can't purr.
- The Magic Voyage features a shark who roars like a cougar.
- The Rugrats Movie features a wolf whose growls sound more like some sort of big cat than a wolf.
- The mythical Golden Herons in Kubo and the Two Strings are voiced by the Common Loon.
- Tarzan:
- The gorillas all make chimpanzee sounds. In reality, gorillas grunt, scream, belch and (oddly enough) purr, but they don't 'pant-hoot' like chimps. Granted, Kerchak does make gravely grunts, snorts and roars, which are at least semi-realistic.
- While real leopard vocalizations are used, Sabor also frequently utters cougar yells, even though leopards are roaring cats and don't make such vocalizations. Tiger roars are also used, but at least they are pretty close to how a leopard sounds.
- The Cossack cats in An American Tail snarl and growl like leopards. Justified because they are seen from the perspective of mice, to whom a domestic cat is as dangerous as a big cat would be to a human. Other felines in the movie, however, are capable of speech.
- Finding Nemo:
- Finding Nemo has a roaring barracuda and a screeching anglerfish. Given their respective scenes are particularly heavy on Nightmare Fuel, this is most likely a case of Rule of Scary. The giant squid from Finding Dory also utters a few guttural growls and snarls.
- Speaking of roaring barracudas, a barracuda seen briefly during Tip and Dash's song in The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea roars like a grizzly bear.
- In Dumbo, a striped hyena laughs and a gorilla produces a roar similar to Tarzan's yell. Although the striped hyena is usually silent, they are technically capable of laughing, but unlike the loud giggles of the spotted hyena, the striped hyena's laugh sounds more like a high pitch chatter.
- For whatever reason, Mr. Freeze’s two polar bears in Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero constantly let out big cat roars and growls and seldomly utter actual bear vocalizations.
- In Felix the Cat Saves Christmas, Rock Bottom somehow gets attacked by a group of squirrels that oddly make dolphin sounds.
- Kung Fu Panda: Tai Lung (a snow leopard) frequently roars like a Tiger. Actual snow leopards' vocal abilities are extremely limited as they don't have voice boxes.
Films — Live Action
- The swan in Hot Fuzz honks like a goose. The particular species of swan seen here is a Mute swan
; it is capable of making some sounds, usually hissing at predators (or people who get too close), but it doesn't honk.
- In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, all the big cats except Aslan make puma sounds, and the badgers make guinea pig noises.
- The giant mutant ants in Them! are quite noisy for creatures without vocal cords. The sounds are actually Spring Peepers (small frogs found in the eastern USA).
- All fictional lizards (the cute ones, at least) seem to make the same weird nasal growling noise (which comes from, of all things, a baby jaguar). The trailer for Nim's Island featured an impossibly talkative bearded dragon. They only hiss — and they'll do that only if you try to give them a bath.
- African elephants frequently use recordings of their Asian counterparts in film. This is likely due to the fact that fewer African elephant recordings exist in public domain sound effects libraries (helped by the fact that the two genera sound similar enough anyway that only an expert is likely to notice the difference).
- A documentary on big cats gave a cheetah a fierce roar. When they fail to point out that cheetahs do not roar (they chirp!), one can turn off the TV and take refuge in the encyclopedia.
- The most hilarious recent example can be heard in this trailer for Oceans. Err, those aren't baby ducklings...
- The roaring shark comes from Jaws: The Revenge. It certainly doesn't help that the roar sounds suspiciously like Jerry's roar from a Tom and Jerry sketch either. Like Bruce IV's famous bellowing in Jaws: The Revenge, Brucette in Jaws 3-D growled whenever she opened her mouth (it was a very deep watery sound that you might miss most of the time), and a soft echoing roar is heard when Bruce's decapitated body sinks into the abyss at the end of Jaws (though that's merely symbolic, and was the same roar from Spielberg's earlier film Duel). Sharknado 2: The Second One also had roaring sharks and was likely inspired by this.
- There's a roaring shark in Shark Attack 3: Megalodon too.
- Caesar the chimpanzee is heard roaring like a lion in a trailer for Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Did they give him that ability as a test run at the lab, before giving him a human-level intellect?
- In Conan the Barbarian, the vulture that tries to eat Conan when he's nailed to the Tree of Woe sounds like some type of seagull, which is doubly wrong because Conan is biting its neck and it shouldn't be able to vocalize at all.
- The ferrets in The Beastmaster make some very un-ferret like sounds. Real ferrets make very little sound most of the time, but often hiss, grunt, and make a sort of chortling sound when playing.
- Kimble's ferret in Kindergarten Cop similarly makes lots of squeaking, chittering noises that ferrets don't really produce.
- A roaring giant squid in the adaptation of Peter Benchley's The Beast. The squid actually made a distorted shriek/screech, like a giant mechanical eagle (or red-tailed hawk).
- In Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, at the beginning of the film a tapir is shown except it squeals like a pig. In reality, tapirs make chuffing noises or high-pitched mouse-like squeaks instead of squealing like that.
- When they're not howling, the wolves in Beauty and the Beast (2017) very noticeably growl like lions.
- Prey (2022): The mountain lion makes deep growls like an African lion rather than the much higher-pitched growls and shrieks that mountain lions actually make.
Literature
- This trope is mentioned in one of the Teddy Robinson books. The titular teddy bear meets a cow, who goes "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm". When Teddy Robinson asks why she doesn't go "moo", the cow replies that only storybook cows go "moo".
Live-Action TV
- In Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Skippy's trademark 'tchk tchk tchk' noise was entirely fictional. Kangaroos make no such sounds.
- Flipper's famous chatter? That's a sped-up kookaburra.
- The Colbert Report has an opening sequence has a red, white, and blue bald eagle making a red-tailed hawk's cry. The show being what it is, it's either intentional or would be if they knew.
- An episode of Monk had the murder suspect of the week be a chimpanzee who was dubbed over with the more commonly recognized spider monkey noises. Chimps are apes. They make completely different sounds.
- MythBusters actually found an aversion: movie rattlesnakes and real rattlesnakes sound almost exactly alike. It would still be possible to use this trope (the Busters' own test and the stock recording were both Western Diamondbacks, the largest species and therefore the loudest rattlers; pinging the sound to something tiny or something that's not a rattlesnake at all would do it) but in an episode where many sounds were more wrong than this, it was nice to know that the sound of something that might kill you is accurately presented.
Music
- Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" mentions a howling owl. Although owls have been known to hoot, screech, cry, whistle and bark, they do not howl.
Radio
- Long-running soap opera The Archers frequently got caught out this way. It took the BBC a long time to realise that in a drama about farmers, they better had get the sound effects absolutely right. Merely ordering up "a sheep" or "a cow" from the BBC sound effects department wasn't going to cut it, not with a professionally aware audience. Farmers and shepherds would write in and complain - pointing out that if Dan Archer was out in the fields in February lambing a ewe, why then was the sheep he was tending to not making the distinctive noises of a ewe in labour? And for a supposedly newborn lamb, why was its bleating sounding like an eight-month old lamb in the fields? Oh, and that wasn't a cow Walter Gabriel was tending, you do realise you were playing a recording of a bull in heat just about to service a heifer? And them chickens what Clarrie Grundy was feeding, they weren't Rhode Island Reds at all, they was Belgian Red Wattles, completely distinctive clucks. The BBC gave in, and sent people out to farms with tape recorders to talk to thep professionals and to get some really accurate animal sounds.
Video Games
- The Bloody Roar series is guilty as charged with most of the characters' animal forms, though the most glaring example would be Yugo, the roaring wolf.
- Broforce has a title screen where a bald eagle makes the sound of a red-tailed hawk.
- Early on in Deadly Premonition, a cutscene shows squirrels that sound like chimpanzees.
- Digital Devil Saga: The Demon Nue, which is a chimera hybrid of a monkey and tiger, infamously makes stock seagull sounds.
- Far Cry 3: The cassowaries that appear in this game sound absolutely nothing like cassowaries. Real cassowaries make low, sub-bass booming sounds, almost ape-like hoots, and elephant-like grunts.
- In Fate/Grand Order, this is Played for Laughs by Tamamo Cat, who, despite her name, emits barking sounds like a dog in-between mangled Ice-Cream Koan and Pun-filled speech. Then again, her legend thinks she's a fox when she's actually a jackal, and she's a Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie variation of the more serious Tamamo-no-Mae in Fate/EXTRA.
- During the dramatic opening of Final Fantasy IX, there's a close-up of a pigeon crying like a red-tailed hawk.
- The Barn Owl (famous for being silent fliers) in Fly Like a Bird makes sound as its wings flap.
- Impressive Title has a giant manta ray boss known as the Monster Ray, which occasionally emits a loud cacophonous sound that many players have likened to a cow's "moo" note despite the fact that rays don't have vocal cords.
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Fleurina, a big Funny Animal swan, screeches like a red-tailed hawk.
- A very strange example, as it swaps out an awesome-sounding call for a rather cuter one: in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Wolf Link gives coyote howls instead of wolf howls. This is probably because a coyote's howl sounds more musical for the Ocarina of Time-style howling melody sections.
- In Ori and the Blind Forest, the Big Bad Ominous Owl Kuro vocalizes with the aforementioned red-tailed hawk call. In the sequel, the Sand Worm in Windtorn Ruins has a stock tiger roar, as does Howl the dire wolf (who never actually howls) at the beginning of the game.
- In Super Mario 64, Klepto the Condor's cry is actually the call of a goose.
- Averting this trope is discussed in Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (1997): The player can give Anne Tikwitee a bird whistle that corresponds to a bald eagle. What plays isn't the (incorrect) high pitched screech many people expect — it's actually the (correct) eagle chirp. Anne then says "Whoa! For a big bird that's one small call!"
- Averted in Wingspan's official app. The Bald Eagle's cry is the correct sound for it, while the Red-Tailed Hawk trivia points out how its cry is often used in place of the Bald Eagle's in movies.
- Yakuza 2: The tigers Kiryu faces in a boss battle are bizarrely given leopard and lion recordings as sound effects. This is all but completely averted in the remake; save for one lion roar, all their sound effects are tiger recordings.
Western Animation
- Phineas and Ferb:
- Perry the Platypus makes a distinctive chirping chatter that is notably his only vocalization. Real-life platypuses make a soft growling purr when agitated (which admittedly sounds somewhat like Perry's noises).
- The dodo in "Last Train to Bustville" makes a weird "narg narg" call. The dodo was actually named for its call, which was a pigeon-like sound something like "doo-doo".
- In an episode from The Wild Thornberrys, a hungry male lion trying to hunt Eliza briefly gets stuck in a thorn bush and roars like a grizzly bear.
- The Sovereign from The Venture Brothers makes the typical Red Tailed Hawk call when he turns into an eagle. But then he's a nameless shapeshifter pretending to be David Bowie pretending to be an eagle...
- The bats that flutter across the screen at the start of the opening credits for Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! all chitter their little heads off. Disturbed bats generally book it without emitting cries that humans can hear, as they're too busy echolocating so they don't run into one another.
- An in-universe example in Batman: The Animated Series episode "On Leather Wings". Batman (as Bruce Wayne) brings a recording of bat-like sounds to Dr. March, an expert in bats, and claims that the sounds are coming from his chimney. Dr. March later calls and says that the sounds are from brown bats and starlings, probably fighting over a nest. Batman runs the combination through his computer, which states the sounds do not match either species and proving that Dr. March is lying about something.
- The Lion Guard:
- In one of the most jarring departures from the films, zebras make horse noises.
- As usual, hyenas still yelp like dogs.
- The episode "Britrock" from Jem features a fox that makes dog noises.
- Played for Laughs in Tom and Jerry where Jerry was capable of making an absolutely horrifying guttural monster roar when he needed to frighten or intimidate Tom. Feast your ears. Hilariously, this same sound effect was apparently also used for the shark in Jaws: The Revenge, making a scene with a roaring shark even more Narmy because to many viewers it was a shark roaring like a cartoon character.
- Whenever Magilla Gorilla tries to act like a wild gorilla, he produces a Tarzan-esque yell. This is carried over to Magilla's cameo in Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?.
- DuckTales (2017): Some of the non-anthropomorphic animals in the show make sounds inaccurate for their species. Matilda McDuck's emu makes goose-like honks rather than the characteristic drumming sounds real emus make, and Santa's reindeer make horse-like neighs and snorts opposed to accurate reindeer sounds.
- The Simpsons:
- In "Diggs", Comic Book Guy gets a falcon that mimics human speech like a parrot, which he lampshades. Funnily enough, falcons are actually related to parrots.
- Averted in "The Musk That Fell to Earth", which had a bald eagle that makes accurate chirping noises, to the point the family names it "Squawky". Other episodes, however, has it make the stereotypical red-tailed hawk cry.
- In the last segment of "Treehouse of Horror XXIX", Jacqueline turns into a dinosaur and makes roaring noises. Said dinosaur is a Parasaurolophus, believed to have made trumpeting bellows due to its hollow crest.
- "Gorillas on the Mast" had an orca that makes humpback whale songs (orcas chirp and squeak like other dolphins) and tigers that purr (something big cats don't).
- One episode of Jonny Quest had a toucan that mimics human speech like a parrot, which toucans can't do in real life.
- In the Magic School Bus episode "Hops Home", there is an opossum that makes rodent-like noises.
- An episode of Journey To The Center Of The Earth featured a giant caterpillar that for some reason sounded exactly like a cat.
- Duck from Sarah & Duck, is a male mallard, yet he quacks like a female one. In real-life, male mallards cannot properly quack, with their call sounding more raspy and quiet.
- In the Squidbillies episode "Ol' Hootie", there is an owl that makes the generic red-tailed hawk screech.
