Chapter 1.3

The Uncanny Valley & Film/Animation

From "Blade Runner" to "Terminator," some of the most frightening movie villains have been androids - robots that look and act human. What is so scary about these life-like machines?  

Masahiro Mori has an answer. According to what he calls “The Uncanny Valley" theory, the more human-looking a machine becomes, the more people are drawn to it. But at the point when a robot looks and acts almost human but not quite, people are repulsed and the approval rating plummets. The same applies to animation, in Toy Story, (1995, Pixar) we love Woody and Buzz Light-year, but are totally unmoved by Andy, their human owner. During a panel at the Comic Con show 2007, Neil Gaiman did some interviews to promote the forthcoming movie version of Beowulf that he was scripting, and was less than complimentary about director Robert Zemeckis' Polar Express with its "horrid little rotoscope-y ghost people".

http://www.comic-con.org/cci2007/cci_prog.shtml

This is something both videogame and movie special effects artists are having to grapple with now that processing power is allowing ever more naturalistic representations of human characters. Realistic movement is a key element to overcoming “The Uncanny Valley" in computer-generated characters, industry leaders said Tuesday at Siggraph, the international computer graphics confab taking place this week. The hypothesis originally was used to describe robots but recently has become a popular way of describing the emotional responses to computer-animated characters in movies and video games. "Given where the industry is at and how many characters we are being asked to create ... motion capture is a fact of life," Weta Digital's Joe Letteri said of the capture technique now frequently linked to CG character development.

http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/media/factsheets/special.html

Continue to Chapter 1.4 - The Uncanny Valley & Video Games