Computer animated films near 'Uncanny Valley'

Sometimes the characters I see in computer animated movies creep me out.

I understand they are not real and there's nothing dangerous about them. Something about the way they look just makes me uncomfortable.

They're beginning to look too real.

I'm not alone in my way of thinking. For more than a century, psychologists and social theorists have pondered the point where artificial life will become too life-like for human society.

Today, theorists refer to this point as the "Uncanny Valley." But, that concept is couched in the psychological principles of what humans conceptualize as familiar and unfamiliar.

Many link the first psychological conceptualization of the uncanny to German psychologist Ernst Jentsch. In his 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny," Jentsch explored the psychological boundaries that separate the familiar from the unfamiliar.

Jentsch felt the boundary was often violated when we are forced to question if an object is really alive or not. While Jentsch if often credited with coining the term "The Uncanny," it was actually brought to prominence by Sigmund Freud.

In his 1919 essay, "The Uncanny," Freud expanded the concept to examine the way things we encounter in daily life can be familiar yet strange at the same time. For Freud, these situations created conflicts of feelings and thoughts, described as cognitive dissonance.

Both Jentsch and Freud based their conceptualizations in the literature of E.T.A. Hoffman, a German fiction writer known for creating characters that exhibited uncanny characteristics.

While the term and concept of "The Uncanny" was discussed, science was not ready to bring the concept to the public, the implications of "The Uncanny" were not realized, and its discussion was regulated to literature.

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori reintroduced the concept into popular culture in 1970.

In his article, "The Uncanny Valley," Mori asserted that as robotics become more advanced and their appearance more life-like, the small imperfections in appearance will cause them to appear eerie - thus causing cognitive dissonance as Freud asserted years earlier.

Mori's theory interest in robotics will proceed until we reach the point when they become too lifelike. When that saturation point is reached, interest in robotics will fall, and people will react adversely to them - thus we fall into the "Uncanny Valley."

Mori's solution to the problem of the Uncanny Valley was that we simply shouldn't make robots that look so much like people - for the most part, we haven't.

Despite recent advances in robotics and automation technology, robots are still slow and awkward-looking.

In recent years though, computer generated animation has become immensely popular and may hold the key to a modern concept of the "Uncanny Valley."

Companies, such as Disney-owned Pixar Animation Studios, have produced several high-quality computer films that have won several major awards and rake in millions of dollars.

But not all computer animated films have been as fortunate.

Other films, like Columbia Pictures' "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," have been panned by both critics and the public, leading to poor sales.

While both movies were seen as technically impressive and visually appealing, the difference may lie in their approach to the human form.

Pixar's films, and other successful computer-generated films, have often taken a semi-realistic approach to animation. Less successful films, such as "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" and "The Polar Express" have attempted a more realistic view of computer animation.

Their failure to achieve substantial success in the market may the first sign of a tangible manifestation to the "Uncanny Valley."

There is one caveat to the idea of "The Uncanny," though. Some believe that exposure to the uncanny reduces the cognitive dissonance it causes and that we can get used to seeing the unfamiliar - thus the "uncanny valley" may never be realized.

That idea doesn't comfort me much though - I'll stick with cartoons for now.


Originally published in The Daily Reveille...