In the Japanese version, Dōbutsu no Mori +, two paintings that were present in the original Dōbutsu no Mori, the Dreadful Painting and the Novel Painting, are not obtainable in the normal course of play. However, they still exist in the game's code and can be legitimately brought over to a player's save file by importing one from Dōbutsu no Mori (via Nintendo of Japan's now-defunct Data Moving Service), though they can't be donated to the Museum. In the international release of Animal Crossing, however, these paintings are completely removed, and their index numbers instead point to duplicates of the DUMMY furniture item.

It's likely that the decreasing accessibility of these paintings was due to the fact that their real-world equivalents, Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and Piet Mondrian's "Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue", were still under copyright at the time. The Munch and Mondrian portfolios wouldn't enter the public domain until 2015, well after the Dreadful and Novel paintings were retired from the series.