uncanny valley

It’s a question of preference: The Incredibles or The Incredible Hulk?

By which I’m referring to Pixar’s 2004 stylized animated adventure about a family of superheroes, versus the 2008 Louis Letterier-directed actioner, which featured a fully computer-animated and (kind of) photo-real Hulk.  That is, as photo-real as you can get without encountering a real-life muscle-bound green-skinned gigantor. 

But to the point, both films turned on animated characters.  The difference, of course, being that Pixar’s characters were cartoonish and stylized, all goofy outsized features and limbs, whereas the transforming monster of the Marvel film was intended to look, well, real enough to stand side-by-side with honest-to-goodness human actors… and Liv Tyler too.  Somehow the Pixar characters had so much more expression and humanity to them.

Along those same lines, you ever wonder why Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny manages to retain so much more humanness than the photorealistic CGI denizens of a flick like Polar Express?  Think back.  Think hard.  Remember how dead-eyed mannequin Tom Hanks haunted us that holiday season? 

High-gloss digital characters and environments pervade the cinema of the moment, but so much of it seems to leave audiences cold.  It’s hard not to feel like special effects are… well, not all that special lately.  Are they in retrograde?

And what’s the cause of this chilling effect?  With filmmakers like Peter Jackson and James Cameron crowing the advances of motion-capture and digital character-making, why does it all still look so phony?

According to scientists and robotics experts, the answer lies in a decades-old theory known as “the uncanny valley.”  Conceived by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, the term literally refers to a dataset mapped on a graph, one axis depicting a robot’s increasing human likeness, and the other our emotional response to viewing them.  As robots more closely resemble real people, we actual humans become more and more distrustful of them, even a little revolted.  When machines reach for a close degree of human mimicry, we become ever more keenly aware of their innate inhumanity.

Now a major new study by a bunch of fancy Princeton scientists suggests the uncanny valley phenomenon affects primates too.  According to this article in Science Daily, monkeys show a humanlike fascination with visual representations of themselves.  But as those representations grow increasingly lifelike while not necessarily real-looking, the monkeys grow distrustful. 

Based on these early results, said fancy-pants researchers suspect the uncanny valley response is tied to the highly evolved facial response functions we humans share with our primate cousins.  Others suspect the phenomenon may be connected to human “disgust responses,” developed to help early man and woman identify their sick brethren, and in turn avoid infection. 

But enough with all the science.  I want to know, what did the monkeys think of that Avatar trailer?