The Uncanny Valley

In recent years, human animating capabilities have soared. Companies like Pixar and Dream Works produce film after film, each with increasingly more realistic looking animated characters. Yet, when some of these films are viewed, the awe at the near perfect animations and the appreciation for what must have been a very skilled animator is replaced by uneasiness, even creepiness. Take for example, the recent Disney animation Mars Needs Moms. The characters in this movie are extremely well animated and look very humanoid, in fact, they look a little too humanoid. It is as if a threshold on animation anthropomorphism has been passed, causing all the characters to appear, well, weird.

Believe it or not, this phenomenon (things that look too human making us uneasy) has a name: The Uncanny Valley. This name, almost as strange sounding as the phenomenon it describes, refers to the visible dip in a graph created by roboticist Masahiro Mori that plots human empathy against how closely a non-humanoid object represents a human (see above). According to the graph, human empathy for human-like objects increases up to a point, at which things get a little too real and empathy drops sharply.

Although no one knows exactly why this Uncanny Valley exists, one theory emphasizes the evolutionary need for a brain mechanism that would trigger dislike for something almost human, but not quite. According to this theory, the reason humans are uneasy upon viewing things like the animations in Mars Needs Moms is that these animations appear to be very humanoid, enough to trick the brain into processing them as humans, yet do not resemble humans perfectly. This contradiction, something that looks human yet does not behave perfectly human, is what causes dislike in the human brain. If you understand the basis of the theory (it is very confusing!), then the evolutionary importance follows easily. Things like disease and mental disorders alter the appearance and actions of humans, and a functioning system to detect and generate fear of such evolutionarily dangerous things is a necessity for human survival.

Maybe someday animation companies will perfect the human form (appearance, movement, etc.), and this Uncanny Valley will disappear. I am not sure if I want that day to come, however, because it means that our brains will be unable to distinguish the animations from real humans, and that makes me feel more uneasy than the current state of humanoid animation.