Scientific Fact or Cinematic Fiction: Term Paper Two

         Honey, Who Killed the Kong?

           Since the beginning of special effects, from primitive clay-mation to CGI motion capture, filmmakers have been toying with scale of it's characters for generations. While creating giant monsters and tiny people, the movie industry often doesn’t take into account the changes that would have to be made in order for those creatures to survive at different scales. In order for these extreme changes to be successful, you cannot just change the size to scale and expect them to survive. Mother Nature designed large and small creatures specifically for their individual functions and physiology. Deviations from these anatomical truths can be seen from a monstrous standpoint in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, as well as Honey I Shrunk the Kids on the opposite end of the scale. Proportions also have their own restrictions, and the breaking these rules can be seen with Who Framed Rodger Rabbit?’s Jessica Rabbit. These changes are often done to depart from the “spectacle of the everyday,” meaning, giving the audience something they don’t see everyday, or will ever witness in real life. Hollywood often blatantly disregards principles of size and proportion when creating various creatures, which would not be able to survive in the real world, for the sake of entertainment.

 In Short, why this will never happen.

            Large and small creatures are built differently for a reason, and the mathematics used for shrinking and enlarging them isn’t as straightforward as one would think. Just look at basic geometry. If we enlarged something 100x its size, not all dimensions are going to evenly increase 100x as well. If we have a square, with 1x1 dimensions, its area is 1. However, when we increase its dimensions by 2, the area isn’t 2x as large. Instead, 2x2=4, the area isn’t simply doubled but quadrupled! Furthermore, when we take a look at cubes, a 1x1x1 cube has a volume of 1, but when we double the dimensions, 2x2x2=8, the volume is not doubled but 8x larger! As something’s size changes, the correlation in area and volume changes substantially faster than it’s linear dimensions.

            As a result, physiological relationships are affected as well. For instance, the rate oxygen is extracted from the air is proportional to lung size. The rate heat is lost is due to the surface area of the body. And the rate oxygen and food is supplied versus heat produced is proportional to the mass. “If an animal performs well at any given size, size change alone implies that these related functions must change at different rates, since their underlying geometric bases change at different rates; if the animal is to be functional at the changed size, either functional relations must change or shape must change” (LaBarbera).

            Peter Jackson’s King Kong revisits an old film of a behemoth primate that climatically scales the Empire State building. In this modern version of the movie, King Kong is roughly 25 feet tall, 7 times the height of an average gorilla. While it is fun to imagine a gigantic gorilla running rampant in New York and punching out T-Rexes faster than you can say, “Jeff Goldblum,” this would have been physically impossible for a creature of his stature.

One of the better quality fight scenes on youtube.

As mentioned earlier, when the dimensions of something is increased, the mass is multiplied eight-fold. While King Kong is 7 times larger than an average gorilla, which can weigh up to 500 lbs in silverbacks, he would of weighed anywhere from 50-60 tons! That’s way more than just 7 times the standard weight. While this just seems like an impressive number, it is very important in terms of what holds him together: bones. All bones virtually have the same breaking stress, and larger animals push the limits of their own skeletons. According to Andrew Biewener of Harvard, “for the long bones in the limbs of mammals, the changes in shape that accompany evolutionary changes in size are not sufficient to compensate for the increased loads.”
            There aren't too many large terrestrial animals roaming around these days, but we can take a look at elephants as an example. When viewing elephants at the zoo, it's not the fence that keeps these pachyderms contained in their enclosures, but the dry moat that surrounds it. Due to their massive weight, a drop of several feet or so is enough to shatter their bones. The elephants are quite aware of this, and do not try venturing out.

In contrast to the king of the jungle, the largest elephant ever recorded weighed 24,000lbs, about 8 tons, which quite light in comparison to the 50-60 tons King Kong would weigh. As a result, if elephants stretch the limits of what bone strength can handle, King Kong would most certainly be crushing them. At that extreme weight, a land animal wouldn't even be able to stand upright. Therefore, all the running, jumping, and drop kicking that King Kong performs in the movie is virtually impossible because in the process he would be shattering nearly every bone in his body.
            While King Kong most certainly wouldn't be running around at that size, it would be plausible for something of his stature to exist, but under the right circumstances. The largest land creatures to ever exist were Sauropods, some estimated weighing more then 200 tons. However, there are many physiological differences between dinosaurs and mammals, as well as the living and atmospheric conditions on the earth millions of years ago versus today. For simplicity sake, we will compare King Kong to a giraffe since they are close to the same height and are from the same Mammalian class. In order to get blood pumping up 20 feet to it's head, giraffes have elastic blood vessels and special valves in their neck arteries. If given these physiological adjustments, King Kong would have a massive heart and high blood pressure, but he would be able to live (Ewalt). He would however, have trouble feeding himself, since he probably needs to consume 1/8 of his weight a day, just like a real gorilla. This would be about 6 tons of food a day! For a creature that would barely be able to crawl, this would be a tremendous task.  In the movie, Skull Island is home to many giant plants and creatures for him to feast on, but in the real world with extremely limited mobility and average sized vegetation to snack on, King Kong would of had an extremely difficult time surviving. While it is fun to imagine giant monsters and animals roaming the lands, there are physiological limitations as to why they can’t exist outside of fiction.

            Honey I Shrunk the Kids is 90’s Disney staple movie where four kids are downsized to ¼” and have to grab their parent’s attention in order to have their father’s machine change them back. While it is entertaining to see them run from brooms and dust bunnies; it would have been impossible for these children to survive at that size unless some extreme (an unmentioned) physiological changes were made. As mentioned earlier, in order for these extreme changes to be successful, you cannot just change their size to scale and expect them to survive. Large and small creatures and built differently for a reason. In terms of these children, lets say the tallest teen is about 5 feet tall, which is 60.” If they are a quarter of an inch tall, their linear dimensions are down by a factor of about 240 (60” = .25” x 240). Their surface area is 240x240 less, that’s 57,600 less surface area for which they loose body heat. However, their body mass, which generates body heat, has decreased by 240x240x240, which is 13 million times less! While they have a considerable loss in surface area for loosing heat, the part of themselves that generates heat is much more significant. They are going to need more than just a Lego to keep warm, or some major physiological adjustments.

            So how do smaller mammals keep warm? Using the Pygmy Shrew as an example since it’s one of the smallest mammals, weighing less than 4 grams, it’s evident that this is not an easy task. Due to their small size and consequently large surface area relative to their mass, the Pygmy Shrew works hard to stay warm. They radiate heat, and restore heat by consuming food, and lots of it. Specifically, consuming ¾ of their body weight in food a day. This causes them to run into another problem: the time and energy it takes to find food. These types of creatures of have awful schedules; they eat for three hours, they rest for three hours, and then they repeat. If they don’t eat for 2-3 hours, they die. And the colder the air temperature is, the shorter amount of time they can go without food. This is a huge contrast to Honey I Shrunk the Kids, who don’t nearly eat enough to keep themselves alive by these standards. They complain about being hungry, but the only thing they consume during their 24 hours of being small, is some cookie and frosting. While they need to consume a snowman-sized quantity of food in order to survive, they eat enough cookie to amount to a piece of cake. This is nowhere near enough the ¾, and possibly even more, weight of food they would need just to stay alive. Additionally, they sleep soundly through the night without having to forage for food every few hours, and wake up the next day without freezing to death.   

            In Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Rick Moranis’s character Wayne Szalinski invents a shrinking machine that accidentally goes off on his children while he is at a conference. At said conference, Szalinski explains, “All matter is made up of not only density but of empty space, and if we can proportionally reduce the amount of empty space in any given object, we can, thereby, shrink the object.” This is laughable in terms of shrinking object since reducing so called “empty space” would just increasing an object’s density, it would have the same amount of mass but in a smaller package. Furthermore, it is even less likely (well, impossible) in terms in of safely shrinking human beings!

            Atoms, the building block of this world, do not scale. They are fixed; there is no way to reduce the size of a proton, neutron, or electron. One would not be able to change the number of sub-atomic particles while maintaining the same chemical characteristics. A farfetched possibility to shrink a human would be to reduce the number of atoms in the human body. However, this is an impractical task, which one would need to figure out which atoms could be removed without destroying vital organs and altering cells. This is absurd, since there is no way one could reduce the human brain to the size of an insect’s by removing atoms and believing it would not impact their mental capability. On the cellular level, these structures function based on their atomic makeup, and altering it would drastically change how the body operates (Dunder). In contrast to the film, Szalinski couldn’t even shrink an apple without it exploding, and somehow his own children are able to undergo his machine without any visible side affects. Inconceivable! If Honey I Shrunk the Kids was true to life, these children would of suffered brain damage, countless genetic and physical mutations, and quite possibly unable to sustain life. However, drooling, dying blobs of human remains isn’t very Disney, so they ride an ant instead.

Good luck with that....

            Aside from shrinking four children to the size of lint being completely futile, the physics of Honey I Shrunk the Kids aren’t accurate either. The four children are smaller than a Cheerio and have to survive against harmless everyday objects that are now quite threatening, such as water droplets, bugs, and mud. While life on the small size is much different than our daily lives, Disney makes these look like they’re running around in a giant playground, rather than actually surviving at a small scale. For instance, when flying on a giant bee, the boys hold on for dear life and sustain injuries when they fall off. One boy is knocked unconscious, and both have cuts on their lips. However, they did not need to be terrified of falling off, nor should they have sustained those injuries. All objects have terminal velocity; an object accelerates as it falls until it reaches this constant speed. Or hits the ground, whichever comes first. For normal sized humans, this is 120 mph, which is quite deadly. However, as objects get smaller, gravitational pull decreases more rapidly than drag, so the terminal velocity decreases as well (LaBarbera). As a result, small animals such as squirrels and mice, cannot be hurt from any fall no matter how high. Consequently, the children that are much smaller than mice in Honey I Shrunk the Kids, should of just walked away without a scratch.

Movie set or giant playground/tourist trap?

            There are several other inconsistencies with Honey I Shrunk the Kids that make it feel like a super sized playground, rather than the point of view of an insect. Towards the end of the movie, one of the boys falls into a bowl of Cheerios that Moranis is eating. Being the size of lint, he should have just floated on the surface since his mass and size aren’t large enough to break the surface tension. However, he splashes right in and nearly drowns in the milk. While his father was dipping in a spoon and causing some disturbances in the liquid, this does not explain why the boy initially splashed right in. Consequently, it’s quite hard to get something that small and living immersed in liquid. For instance, if one is in a pool and tries to remove a struggling bug by splashing it out, the bug remains at the surface, and usually unfathomed by the splashing. Due to certain childhood experiences, it is common knowledge that it is quite hard to drown a bug. In regards to the movie, the boy should have just floated at the surface.

Not how the movie ended! But you get the water/milk tension idea.

            Another instance in which the kids didn’t seem like they were in a small world, was their struggle to pick up objects. Their need to use teamwork to pick up the miniaturized couch, their struggle with climbing up a flower steam and into a Lego shows an unrealistic representation of lifting capabilities of smaller creatures. “The forces that a muscle can produce are proportional to its cross-sectional area (length squared), while body mass is proportional to volume (length cubed). The ratio of an animal's ability to generate force to its body mass scales approximately as 1/length; smaller animals are proportionally stronger. This geometric truth explains why an ant can famously life 50 times its body weight, while we can barely get the groceries up the stairs; were we the size of ants, we could lift 50 times our body weight, too” (LaBarbera). According to our math earlier, the children’s relative strength should of increased 240 fold. They should be zipping up and down all the flowers they could find, and quickly made it back to the house due to their increased metabolic rate. However, Disney, and other Hollywood studios, often shrinks down their characters without portraying a realistic representation of what it really is like to be less than an inch tall.

            After discussing the extremely small and immensely large to scale adjustments Hollywood does to creatures, the movie industry will do the same to proportions. For instance, Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Rodger Rabbit? is a prime example of this. While Jessica Rabbit is more “realistic” then most of the cartoons in the movie, she has been created to push the boundaries of what is humanly possible, to the point where it is too far.

            For instance, the most extreme and dangerous change would be her unnaturally tiny waist. In contrast to average women, she appears more like a tight-lacer: women who wear extreme corsets to dramatically change their waist size and figures into hourglasses, with or without the corsets. The most extreme case of this was Ethel Granger, who shrunk her waist permanently to 13 inches! When Ethel was in her 50s, she could support herself for only a few minutes without the corset, her abdomen and back muscles had atrophied over decades of tight-lacing. While most hardcore tight-lacers don’t make it past 16inches, it’s still a dangerous hobby. The lower ribcage is contracted into a cone which compresses the lungs and only allows shallow breathing, the liver and stomach are forced downward, and there are many cases of fainting, cracked ribs and internal bleeding due to this old fashion statement. Consequently, Jessica Rabbit would have been no exception to this painful lifestyle. One doesn’t have to look at many pictures of her to notice how large her head is compared to her waist. I measured my head and it’s about 22 inches in circumference, and my waist is about 29 inches. Her head on the other hand is quite larger than her waist, suggesting a 16-18 inch waist, impossible to achieve without fabricated help. Even Christina Hendricks, who has been dubbed a “real life Jessica Rabbit,” has a 30 inch waist.

 

  VS

       Tightlacer with Fake Waist and Goods, Bleh!          Christina Hendricks, All Natural and Beautiful!                             

            While it would be painful but possible for Jessica Rabbit to walk (not run) with a petite 18 inch waist, there are other aspects of her proportions that would make her life even more excruciating. Specifically, her biggest “assets.” To put it bluntly, her rack is huge. It’s part of the huge sex appeal that was in mind while creating her. While the animators where looking at women like Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe for inspiration, it’s obvious that men were doing all the drawing. And no one knew basic physics either. In comparison to the rest of her body, Jessica is quite top heavy. Her center of gravity is quite high, and forward. Her body would want to tip forward all the time, which would require constant work for her back muscles if she wanted to prevent this. As a result, it is not uncommon for women with natural, extremely large breasts (F cup and above) to long for breast reduction surgery because they are tired of the constant back pain due to holding their top-heavy torsos up. On top of the unsupportive small waist, trouble breathing and back pain, Jessica would be running around with the world’s most tiniest feet, making balancing an even tougher act. In other words, while Jessica Rabbit is drawn to be desirable character, no one in there right mind would actually want to be her, as a result of the all the pain her body would be going through.

            As mentioned earlier, Hollywood will often shrink, enlarge or alter man and beast to create an entertaining film spectacle. However, these alterations are often beyond the limitations of what is feasible. Due to circumstances in the movies, these may first seem believable, but upon closer inspection, wouldn’t work in the real world. King Kong came from an island untouched by evolution for millions of years, but unless his bones were made of something stronger than bone, he would collapse. Honey I Shrunk the Kids was made possible by a nutty professor’s invention, but the human body is far to complex to safely shrink to something the smaller than an insect. On the other hand, Jessica Rabbit does live in a cartoon. So maybe she’s immune to the back pain, foot pain, crushed organs, and labored breathing that would normally afflict women from being in that state 24/7. This is all justified in the movie industry’s attempt to have us escape our everyday lives. In short, Hollywood often breaks nature’s rules of size and proportion in the pursuit of a captivating movie to grant its viewers a break from the mundane.

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Giving Credit Where Credit is Due


LaBarbera, Michael C. "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters." UChicago.edu. 2003. Web. 17 Nov. 2010. <http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/>.


Ewalt, David M. "The Biology Of King Kong - Forbes.com." Editorial. Forbes.com - Business News, Financial News, Stock Market Analysis, Technology & Global Headline News. 12 Dec. 2005. Web. 17 Nov. 2010. <http://www.forbes.com/2005/12/12/king-kong-biology_cx_de_1213kongbiology.html>.


Dunder, Jonathan. "Miniaturization and Its Plausibility - The Free Information Society." The Free Information Society - Educating and Entertaining since 2003. Web. 17 Nov. 2010. <http://www.freeinfosociety.com/article.php?id=55>.


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Turned out WAAAAAY longer than I anticipated. I wrote the Honey I Shrunk the Kids part of my paper first, went to town on it, and pretty much surpassed the necessary word count just in that section itself....  Had a lot of fun writing this, but it was much longer and time consuming than I thought.