[Pseudoscience-is-malarkey (OP)]

Can a water buffalo (or any buffalo) inhale/exhale as it's snout, nose and mouth are underwater? If the answer is no, which I expect it is, why are filmmakers too lazy or too stupid or too indifferent to such facts?

[Bored chemist]

If film makers were not indifferent to facts we wouldn't have much of a film industry.
Star Wars didn't really happen.

[chiralSPO]

I don't see any reason a buffalo couldn't exhale while submerged.

As for inhaling, yeah... if the creature wants to inhale air, it had better not have its whole face submerged.

As far as how this relates to filmmaking... if they are filming real water buffalo... presumably the creatures are alive and breathing. And if it is animated... why get so excited about such a minor detail? I'm sure the gravity and aerodynamics are also poorly rendered...

[evan_au]

Maybe the film-maker thought that their most aesthetic footage of water buffalo was where they were most in the water.... (Otherwise they just looked like a cow standing in a pool of water.)
- The same probably goes for hippos and crocodiles.

And the most interesting footage* of whales is when they aren't in the water.

*An obsolete term from a time when video was recorded on a linear strip of plastic, and people measured distance by the size of their feet.