Anti-scientific bias of 'scientific' animations

How does personalising cells destroy the magic?

A review of anatomy and physiology videos

Naturally, blood is typically represented as red, as here. The function of Red Cells [Anatomy World]. Red cells are enlarged and spread out to make them visible. We are used to such distortions to make cells visible; perhaps you think I'm being pedantic but a dilution of blood cells like this would be incompatible with life. Anyway, depth is implied by showing artificial incident light and variation in scale and usually the cells are rushing past us to suggest cells propelled by the pumping of the heart and suspended in plasma.

In this video, Red cells are given human features in order to describe: A Day in the Life of red blood cell [Digital disasters] . Red is the obvious colour although in the absence of light, ie inside the body, blood is black but so is everything else. 

Each red cell is given a face, a personality and a voice.

To me, giving faces to organs and cells creates a childish, fairy tale atmosphere which is patronising, deceptive and inaccurate.

If we personalise our organs, we overlook the way they can sometimes fight each other, harbour cancer or weather faster than we would like.  

Darwinian evolution implies that there is no organising intelligence, just an incredible interplay of ultimately autonomous physiological processes which sustain life by constantly maintaining temperature, oxygen, acidity and glucose within a narrow range to sustain the miracle of life. 

Here's a contrasting film: Haematology - Red Blod Cells [Armando Hasudungan]

Perhaps this errs on the opposite end of the scale: the microscopic laboratory vision with conventional ignoring of scale. The danger here is that anatomy is only part of the picture. At heart it is a question of what we want people, medical students, doctors to know of all the facts that have been discovered about blood. This video poses as a scientific account but is only a partial view.

One variant of the red video is in fuchsia pink with contrasting light blue, here used to show the adhesion of platelets to a clot.

Blood, Part 1 - True Blood: Crash Course A&P #29 [CrashCourse]
Blood vessels are usually shown as diagrammatic cylinders, as here. Again, red cells are massively enlarged and widely spaced out. Even this largely 'scientific' film veers into characterisation of whicte blood cells as people:

 This feels sentimental and old-fashioned. Can the audience bear to live in an existential world where our function depends on ingrained, automated reactions to random variation? There is a creepy angle to personalising cells: what if, like people, they become argumentative, temperamental, self-destructive? But this unsettling option is rarely evoked. Most videos would like us to bathe in the comforting image of our tissues and cells constantly working lovingly to help us live our lives with a smiley face.