Post #7: The Uncanny Valley

March 16, 2010 in Uncategorized

The uncanny valley is a somewhat difficult concept to explain, but it should be familiar to everyone with a concerted interest in 3D animation.  Essentially, the uncanny valley is the concept that the closer an animated (or robotic) caricature looks to a real human without emulating it perfectly, the more “off” they appear to the audience.  For example, the human characters in Up don’t set off any alarms in the heads of the audience: they are not realistically proportioned, but their humanity is easy to identify with.  On the other hand, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within attempted to capture photorealism, but the characters felt “off.”  It is a difficult sensation to describe, but somehow the near, but not quite, perfect representation of a human makes it more difficult to identify with them.

A Trailer for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Other films also have fallen prey to the effect.  The Polar Express is often cited as one of the most distracting instances of the uncanny valley in film, since almost all of the characters are realistic computer-generated humans.  I actually firmly believe that much of the reason many do not like the CGI in this film is because of the uncanny valley.  Interestingly enough, the uncanny valley only applies to humans.  Photorealism can be achieved with environments and non-human creatures without this effect occurring, as films such as Avatar have so convincingly portrayed.  I think that the reason for this is that humans can instinctively identify other humans.  We spend our entire lives observing and interacting primarily with other members of our species.  Our recognition is so refined that even a slight blemish, such as an un-human-like eye movement or an inconsistency in the way lips move, is enough for the brain to recognize that it is not a fellow human being.

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