That's really interesting, actually. In what ways are they misleading? Just... things not shaking around enough? How about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RmeDPqYUMI ?
The movie I posted suggests a nice roomy cytoplasm while in reality it is an extremely crowded soup of insanely fast vibrating molecules. Some (many?) proteins do not even have a solid structure or attain it only when they bind something. It also suggests molecules are attracted towards each other when in fact then rely almost completely on things like concentration and Brownian motion for the interaction dynamics.
The movie does give a nice overview of processes but it is important to realize it is not the way it looks (as far as you can speak of "looking" at the molecular scale where photons interact with matter not in a way we "see" it normally, I mean, a protein is not a set of spheres, a carbon ring can absorb a photon or not, it can not bounce it back to reveal to your eye what it looks like.) So we are dealing with models here. Models of a reality we can not really imagine. Like Quantum Mechanics.
>realize it is not the way it looks
Can you blame them? I mean adding even just the free water molecules to the first video would result in two color static music video.
It is extremely hard for me to talk about work to a layman who does not even know what DNA is. Try explaining that every base pairs is about 0.3 nm apart and we have about two meters of DNA, spread over 30.000 genes. What does it mean for promotor accessibility related to transcription factors? It would take some time to calculate these things but I have a pretty nice picture in my head of vibrating proteins and the chaos it is down there (Movies such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY are extremely misleading!)
I had a colleague who got the molecular structure of optically active molecules in his head when he saw the absorption and fluorescence spectra of molecules.
But try getting that into the mind of an infant who learns by doing. Would it make sense? It reminds me of a piece from the book of Woz, where he explains how significant it was for his development that his father explained the workings of a transistor by explaining the flows of electrons. It made understanding much easier for him.
I guess, when a kid is ready I won't hurt to feed her/him such information but I wouldn't teach my son that he could in theory tunnel through the wall and end up in the neighbors kitchen...
Nice topic by the way, I remember watching the quantum mechanics movies (and the relativity movies) on my Encarta CDrom (I was 12 I think) over and over and just enjoy that feeling of uneasiness, the feeling that there is another world down there.