The uncanny valley is a concept that has been known for a very long period of time now, but it is still considered one of the biggest problems in animation and VFX today. In this video, we are going to talk about what it is, look at some examples of it in history, and probably some ways for how to overcome it if possible.
What is the uncanny valley effect?
This concept suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.
Examples can be found in robotics, 3D computer animations, and lifelike dolls. The problem with the uncanny valley is the more we try to create something that comes close to what a human being looks like the more we are prone to fall into the uncanny valley and people’s admiration and love for artistic creation turns into strange feelings of revulsion as some people describe it.
The uncanny valley in Animation and VFX
There are a lot of examples that show us how people react to the uncanny valley effect over the years through many animation projects and films.
And some of the examples include:
- The baby character Billy in Pixar’s groundbreaking 1988 animated short film Tin Toy provoked negative audience reactions, which first led the film industry to take the concept of the uncanny valley seriously.
- The 2001 film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first photorealistic computer-animated feature film, also provoked negative reactions from some viewers due to its near-realistic yet imperfect visual depictions of human characters. Some critics stated that while the film’s animation is brilliant, the real human faces look phony precisely because they’re almost there but not quite”. Also, another critic said: “At first it’s fun to watch the characters, But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements”.
- In The 2001 film, The Mummy Returns there is a scene where we see a scorpion king character coming through a gate with some close-up shot showing what the internet considers to be the worst CGI shot ever created. They actually tried to create something realistic but they, unfortunately, fell directly into the uncanny valley.
- Several reviewers of the 2004 animated film The Polar Express called its animation eerie. Some said about the film that those human characters in the film come across as downright creepy. So The Polar Express is at best disconcerting, and at worst, a little bit horrifying”. and The term “eerie” was also used by other reviewers . Some called the film’s characters “creepy” and “dead-eyed”, and wrote that “The Polar Express is a zombie train”. An Animation director wrote an online analysis describing how changes to the Polar Express characters’ appearance, especially to their eyes and eyebrows, could have avoided what he considered a feeling of deadness in their faces.
- Also the 2007 animated film Beowulf, The film received moderately positive reviews from critics, who complimented the visual effects, motion capture, and voice acting whilst criticizing aspects of the interpretation of the poem in addition to how the characters looked. Some said that the film failed the uncanny valley test, stating that the film’s villain, the monster Grendel, was only slightly scarier than the closeups of our hero Beowulf’s face…which I think is an exaggeration because the film’s characters looked ok! compared to what we have seen in previous films that fell in the uncanny valley.
- Some reviewers of the 2009 animated film A Christmas Carol criticized its animation as creepy, and they said about the film, as in ‘Polar Express,’ the animated eyes never seem to focus. And for all the photorealism, when characters get wiggly-limbed and bouncy as in standard Disney cartoons, it’s off-putting”.
- The 2011 animated film Mars Needs Moms was also widely criticized for being creepy and unnatural because of its style of animation. The film was among the biggest box office bombs in history, which may have been due in part to audience revulsion. Mars Needs Moms was produced by Robert Zemeckis’s production company, ImageMovers, which had previously produced The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol.
- Reviewers had mixed opinions regarding whether the 2011 animated film The Adventures of Tintin was affected by the uncanny valley. one wrote, “Instead of trying to bring to life Herge’s beautiful artwork, Spielberg the director of the film, has opted to bring the movie into the 3D era using the trendy motion-capture technique to recreate Tintin and his friends. Tintin’s original face, while barebones, never suffered for a lack of expression. It’s now outfitted with an alien and unfamiliar visage, his plastic skin dotted with pores and subtle wrinkles.” He added, “In bringing them to life, Spielberg has made the characters dead.”
Another called elements of the animation “grotesque”, writing, “Tintin, Captain Haddock, and the others exist in settings that are almost photo-realistic, and nearly all of their features are those of flesh-and-blood people. And yet they still have the sausage fingers and distended noses of comic-strip characters.
However, other reviewers felt that the film avoided the uncanny valley despite its animated characters’ realism. one Critic wrote, “With the possible exception of the title character, the animated cast of Tintin narrowly escapes entrapment in the so-called ‘uncanny valley'”. and another wrote of the film, “we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the plains of hyperreality”.
- The 2019 film The Lion King, which is a remake of the 1994 film that featured photo-realistic digital animals in place of the earlier film’s more traditional animation, divided critics about the effectiveness of its imagery. Someone wrote that the images were so realistic that “2019 might be best remembered as the summer we left the Uncanny Valley for good”. However, other critics felt that the realism of the animals and setting rendered the scenes where the characters sing and dance disturbing and “weird”.
Also, Multiple commentators cited the CGI half-human half-cat characters in the 2019 movie Cats as an example of the uncanny valley effect, first after the release of the trailer for the film and then after the film’s actual release.
- The 2020 film Sonic the Hedgehog was delayed from its November 8, 2019 release date after an extremely negative audience reaction to the title character’s design in the first trailer which forced the creators to redesign him.
The uncanny valley in video games
These days there are a lot of video games that try to be as realistic as possible, which increases the possibility of falling into the uncanny valley, but somehow people don’t talk about it and they don’t care.
There are some reasons why the uncanny valley is not a thing in video games, but probably one of the most important reasons is because we are used to motion-capturing stiffness in games. Every game would be critically destroyed if it were a feature film. Plus the quality of the actors and the script are often good, which can bring you to overlook the lack of realism. But this again only proves that you don’t need the characters to look realistic in the first place to make the audience emotionally invested in a video game or any other project by the way.
The Uncanny valley in Robotics
The uncanny valley is a concept that was first introduced in the 1970s by Masahiro Mori, then a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Mori coined the term “uncanny valley” to describe his observation that as robots appear more humanlike, they become more appealing—but only up to a certain point. Upon reaching the uncanny valley, our affinity descends into a feeling of strangeness, a sense of unease, and a tendency to be scared or freaked out.
So, the uncanny valley was actually first defined as people’s negative reaction to certain lifelike robots, and then after many years, people in other industries such as VFX and animation started to take the uncanny valley effect seriously after they have seen people react to it and when they started losing money.
Avoiding the Uncanny Valley
So, how can you get around the Uncanny Valley? Unless you intend to create creepy characters or evoke a feeling of unease, you can follow certain design principles to avoid the uncanny valley. The easiest answer is simple: Stay away from very realistic designs! In most cases, your film can benefit from a design that moves away from realism and into something that emphasizes the tone, theme, or some other aspect of your film.
Of course, another way to avoid the Uncanny Valley would be to actually overcome it. But even if we were able to do that – portraying every little detail of our world will always require an insane amount of work and computer power. So why not use our mind’s ability to see life in not-so-realistic designs? In the end, it’s emotional believability and authenticity that will make a story work.
But if you want to do it, make a character more realistic and move it beyond the valley, make sure that a character’s facial expressions match its emotive tones of speech, and that its body movements are responsive and reflect its hypothetical emotional state. Special attention must also be paid to facial elements such as the forehead, eyes, and mouth, which depict the complexities of emotion and thought. “The mouth must be modeled and animated correctly so the character doesn’t appear aggressive or portray a ‘false smile’ when they should be genuinely happy.
If you’re really sure that you cannot film real people with VFX elements on them, you should still try to step away from exactly copying a human. One great way to do this is to slightly change the proportions away from human anatomy. Take the Avatar aliens, for example, Gollum from Lord of the Rings or Alita the battle angle. In these cases realistic textures and elaborated bone and muscle systems make them belong in a realistic environment – but the slight changes in anatomy (bigger eyes, longer limbs) kept them out of the Uncanny Valley. This way the control of appeal is back in the hands of designers. On top of that, the bigger eyes are an excellent stage for an emotional performance.
A professor in this field said that the goal is not to avoid the uncanny valley but to avoid bad character animations or behaviors, stressing the importance of matching the appearance of a robot with its ability. because we as human beings are trained to spot even the slightest divergence from ‘normal’ human movements or behavior. Hence, we often fail in creating highly realistic, humanlike characters.”
But that the uncanny valley appears to be more of an uncanny cliff. We find the likability to increase and then crash once robots or characters become humanlike. But we have rarely observed them overcome the valley.
