Quixotic Bravado

The Uncanny Valley

Over the weekend I was watching The Polar Express. A holiday CGI/motion capture film from 2004 by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks in pretty much every role. This was the first time I’d seen it. The story is cute and the scenery and graphics are great, the problem is that all of the characters are creepy looking.

Why are they so creepy? The film suffers from the Uncanny Valley theory. In a nutshell, this hypothesis states that as computer generated humans become more real-looking, the more apt your brain is to pick out the subtle flaws and the more disturbing they will look.

In an interview for “How Stuff Works” called “The Artificial Intelligence of Halo 2“ Chris Butcher, AI mastermind for the game explains it best:

“As characters become more photo-realistic, you start to believe in them more and more. With humans characters, you get to a certain point of realism. What happens is there are characters that are so realistic you want to believe they are actually human. Then you notice their deficiencies. They have very plastic skin or very wooden eyes. All of the sudden they just become creepy. They are like zombie people, rather than appealing computer people. The appeal of the character rises, then drops dramatically, then rises again as you approach photo-realism.”

The production quality of The Polar Express was good; why didn’t any of the animators stop to tell Tom and Bob the inherit problem with the character design? Who knows. It’s likely they were hoping for an end-result that was realistic without falling into the valley. Maybe I’m exception in thinking they didn’t make it. The geniuses at Pixar know better, even the DreamWorks/PDI crew I think know better. This is why the humans in their films look more like 3D cartoon characters than real humans. You’ll find the family from The Incredibles more realistic than you will Tom Hanks as a Conductor.

So if you, like me found something very off-putting about The Polar Express, now you know why.