Telling Tales// When 3D animation looks TOO real? (Uncanny Valley)

Within the realms of animation, techniques will always have their additional limitations. Even as technology develops further and continues to support the cinematic industry as it does so, limitations will continue to affect certain aspects of the art form. One such limitation involves the pursuit of realism within the industry. The representation of the realistic within animation, especially involving humanoid focuses has always been persuaded by creatives but has always felt slightly sinister in certain examples.   In 1970, a Japanese robotics specialists named Masahiro Mori defined an audiences settlement when viewing something behaving and/or looking human with a term to reflect the limitations of attempting to make something appear 'human'. This term hypothesizes the negative effect from a viewer, of something attempting to imitate 'human' be it in features or behavior. This is defined as the 'Uncanny Valley' phenomenon. A phenomenon effecting the approaching realistic between the scale of unrealistic to realism when creating something. Below is a graph depicting the 'Uncanny Vally'. 

In recent years 3D animation has begun to follow a certain trend in competing in realism within animation. For example, when the 2009 3D motion captured film 'Avatar' was introduced to paying audiences the critics were flabbergasted about the visuals and their 'realness'. However this motion picture was never considered to have entered the 'Uncanny Vally', the computer generated figures may have been humanoids but were also seen as 'aliens' in the movie and there for avoided the human likeness that promotes the phenomenon. However the first incident where a piece of computer animation was considered part of the 'uncanny valley' was in Pixars 1988 short 'Tin Toy', in particular towards the animated baby involved. Roboticist Dario Floreano defined the short as such because of the audience negative reaction to the baby character. This was apparently the first time computer animation had been described as such, and as a result the 3D animation industry began to take the term seriously. Several years later, the 2004 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg was described as 'creepy' and 'unsettling' by reviewers because of the eerily human characters coming across as unsettling in their motion and expressions.  Although the film set a new high for realisum within computer animation, it also fell slap bang into the creepiness of the valley and it wasn't the last from that studio to be considered so.

 2011s 'Mars Needs Moms' was another computer animated film by the same studio to once again, achieve an unsettled reaction from viewers because of it's mixture of realistic humanoid models and cartoony style; however the computer animation did achieve the title of 'box office bombs' coming 2nd... which is no where near a good thing. 

The 'Uncanny valley' is still a very unpredictable thing, based on viewer reaction. Becoming unsettled or seeing something as sinister or creepy differs from viewer to viewer, however there are clear examples of pieces of 3D animation that belong under his definition by critics. Of course we're going to become unsettled by something that mimics human and yet is very much not a human, it's part of our primal way of thinking - right?