Barnyard

"The first transsexual, lesbian, anthropomorphic digital animal animation for kids" - Mark Kermode, BBC Radio 5live

Digimation that - along with the likes of Open Season, Over The Hedge, Hoodwinked and Home On The Range - led directly to Mark asking "what had happened to all the good children's films?" and getting so cross about it he actually made a separate show addressing that question.

Barnyard was a particularly egregious example, however, because of the strange use of male voices for the cows - which, demonstrably, are endowed with udders and therefore female. This whole scenario led to much confusion, with Mark channelling Donald Rumsfeld in saying "the things you know that you know you know turn out to be the things that are wrong."

In a flagrant act of journalism, Mark actually contacted Mark Holdstock of Farming Today to check whether cows with udders are female. Holdstock was so puzzled by the question that he checked with the Chief Executive of Britain's National Beef Association, who confirmed that, yes, if a cow has udders, it is a female cow. Male cows are in fact bulls. You probably knew this already, but the makers of Barnyard clearly did not. (Either that, or they'd seen the ads for Boddingtons from the late 1990s starring Graham The Hermaphrodite Cow and just ripped the idea off).

Barnyard led directly to the creation of the Guidance Game, after listener Peter in Gloucester submitted that it "contains scenes of bovine death and poultry peril."