Let's Talk About Movies: The Uncanny Valley

Alo Party Peoples.


Today, filmmakers can do anything. Computer effects have become advanced enough and inexpensive enough for them to create any creature, device, or world they imagine. You can make an audience feel like they are really in space with a green screen, or make a suburban town into the garden of Eden through Photoshop. In short, you can depict the impossible in a way that feels possible.

One fairly recent example of this has been motion capture animation. The art of taking an actor's motions and facial expressions, and translating them into an animated character. Sometimes, it can look almost real such as Lord of the Rings's Gollum, or Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' Caesar, you may have noticed that Andy Serkis specializes in this sort of role. Other times, attempts at this style go badly, very badly.

This is because of something called the uncanny valley effect, when a non human entity looks similar enough to a human that the inhuman parts stick out even more. For example, that creature to the right from The Adventures of Tintin. Note the dead eyes, and how the more photorealistic face to the right clashes with the more cartoonish features of the man in the bowler hat.

The term goes back to 1970, when Japanese robotics professor Mashahiro Mori published a study on it. He was notable for his work studying the emotional responses humans have to non human entities. He found that, as his machines looked more like people, actual people tended to respond more positively to it, we like it more. Until they hit a certain point, when they were almost human, but the details weren't quite up to snuff. Humans are very good at recognizing other humans, and we can tell if something isn't quite right, and when it is, we become creeped out and repulsed by it, until it looks identical to a human and we like it again. That dip, between stylized and realistic, is the uncanny valley. It's also the reason why dolls are so useful for horror, and why clowns are so often unintentionally terrifying.

This dip isn't always a bad thing, sometimes that uneasy feeling is entirely intentional. For example, CGI young Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy. In that film, Jeff Bridges' character has made a digital replica of himself to run his pet project reality simulator for him, but it's obsession with "creating a perfect system" goes to his head and he snaps. Here, the uncanny figure is supposed to be an imperfect copy of something real, and while it might have partially been the result of the technical limitations of the time, it works.

Why did I do an article on this subject? Well, the dark gritty reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hits US theaters this weekend, and the designs of the titular creatures are right in the center of that dreaded dip in empathy. I thought it was a good jumping off point to discuss something that might have been affecting you even if you had no idea why. In a summer that has had two movies where brilliant motion capture resulted in genuine emotion on the part of the audience, either by conquering the valley or stopping just before the drop, that's unacceptable.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B