Blog Post#7 The Uncanny Valley

I was wondering why we prefer cartoons that depict talking animals rather than animations that are human based and more life-like? A potential answer came to me via NPR’s “On the Media” (go figure) about a theory called the “Uncanny Valley.”

One quick wiki away says, “The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics. The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of human look and act almost liek humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The ‘valley’ in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of robot’s lifelikeness.”

This blew my mind! So the more human-like things that are not human (such as animations, video games, robots), the human viewer will feel anxiety in a physical response!
Then threat of a lifeless entity being threatening is be questioned? Is it a case of Darwinism: where we as the human is scared that something could be created better than us? It is the fear of looking into something soul-less and at the same time so close to life-like?? Whatever the trigger for the repulsion may be, it is the very reason why it is easier to sell and show animations that stray away from reality; rather then trying to recreate it.

I thought that I should provide some examples. The first is from Polar Express, where many critics have agreed that the humans in this animation are way to “creepy.”
The second example I found this weekend at the Hirshorn. Artist John Gerrard takes frame by frame pictures of things such as an oil rig and then makes them into a frame by frame animation. I couldn’t find the video for the actual animation, but here’s the Smithsonian link. http://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/view.asp?key=19&subkey=411

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