he Uncanny Valley is a fascinating concept that keeps coming up, as computer graphics improve and are able to make artificial people look ever more real, while never actually being able to make them look exactly like living humans.  The term "uncanny valley" refers to the empathy humans feel as they watch animated characters, and the way the empathy rises until a certain point, where the animation looks too real, at which time humans can only pick out the unnatural flaws and our empathy plummets. If a perfect likeness were every created, our empathy would, in theory, skyrocket, and thus the uncanny valley actually refers to the line chart that tracks our empathy, based on the realism of the animated character.

If that didn't make sense, never fear; the term is explained in more detail in the archived entries below. More recent updates are on top of this page.

January 17, 2004

Interesting side note in the current Ebert's Movie Answer Man column, a feature posted bi-weekly on the Sun Times site (and in the paper as well, if your paper syndicates Ebert's reviews and columns, I suppose). Readers write in with questions about movies in general, and Ebert answers them with his opinion and often direct quotes from studios or actors, etc.  It's a good feature that's updated every other Sunday.

Anyway, this time there are several mails asking about Gollum/Andy Serkis being nominated for acting awards based on his performance in LotR:RotK or TTT.  Ebert's answer is interesting, but primarily for the digression he indulges in.

Serkis not only voiced Gollum, but did the physical acting that became the basis for the animated creature -- who was certainly one of the most fascinating and convincing characters in the movie. But animation and robot theorists talk about a strange phenomenon that happens when artificial characters begin to seem "too real." This is the Uncanny Valley Effect, named in 1978 by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori.

According to a New Yorker article by John Seabrook, "Mori tested people's emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences." A definition on the Word Spy Web site gives more examples.

It is possible that the rejection of the sci-fi movie "Final Fantasy," which used computer animation to create "real characters," was caused because it fell into the Uncanny Valley. The genius of Gollum is that it seems like a convincingly real creature -- but not one we have ever seen before, so that its realism does not seem creepy except in the ordinary way. If Serkis brought Gollum to life, other artists fine-tuned the balance with the Uncanny Valley. So this is something other than a conventional performance, and should not compete against characters of a different nature. Perhaps a new category is called for? Beyond the Oscar of the Uncanniest Valley?

I don't really agree with him on Gollum being in some other "best CG character" type of category, but that's not what I wanted to talk about.  What I found interesting was the concept he broaches, that robots become more and more charming until they cross some "too-close to human" line and then are suddenly seen as creepy and artificial. It's an interesting concept though, and I'd like to see data from tests on this subject.

I can't find the article online anywhere, but the entry for "uncannyvalley" on the WordSpy site can be seen here.  They have a slightly longer quote from the article:

Early in their collaboration, in the spring of 2002, Winston and Breazeal selected a name: Leonardo, "because this creature represents the ideal collaboration of art and science—an artist and a scientist working together to create something real," Winston said. Then, in Los Angeles, Winston went to work on Leo's body and face. One of the few guidelines from Breazeal was that Leo not look too human, lest he fall into the "uncanny valley," a concept formulated by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist.

Mori tested people's emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences.
—John Seabrook, "It came from Hollywood," The New Yorker, December 1, 2003

They have another quote on the subject as well:

People generally relate better to animated figures that are distinctly outlandish than those that begin to approach the ideal. This is a phenomenon known to robotics researchers as "the uncanny valley"—that point where a robot is so close to lifelike yet still so short of ideal that people become focused on its imperfections.

"That's where every neuron is focused on what's wrong with the robot, on how its motion is not quite right," said Bruce Blumberg, head of the synthetic character program at the MIT Media Lab. "The uncanny valley is a very bad place to be."
—Michael A. Hiltzik, "Synthetic Actors Guild," Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2001

So how about this concept? Malaya rejected it out of hand when I mentioned it to her, along with the Final Fantasy example, but after reading the actual definition page, she's come around to maybe agree with it. It was mostly Ebert's Final Fantasy example that put her off of it, since she actually saw that film, and knows how bad it was, so any concept that people rejected it since it looked weird doesn't fly very far with her.  It's not like everyone rejected Gigli because of some theory about people rejecting movies with titles that had more than 1 but fewer than 3 G's in them.

I'm not sure why Ebert chose that example anyway, unless it was something he'd been long thinking about. Final Fantasy was a pretty forgettable box office bomb; a movie I hadn't thought of in years.  I was interested in it pre-release, based on the hype about the realistic CG and huge budget, but the trailers were boring and the reviews were death, which was enough to keep me away.

So I checked Ebert's review to see what he'd said about the look of things, and here we see the start of the solution.  He loved the movie, gave it a 3.5 stars, and raved about the enjoyable look of it.

In reviewing a movie like this, I am torn between its craft elements and its story. The story is nuts-and-bolts space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's ''A.I.'' But the look of the film is revolutionary. ''Final Fantasy'' is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies. You want to see it whether you care about aliens or space cannons. It exists in a category of its own, the first citizen of the new world of cyberfilm.

So since Ebert liked it and thought it was revolutionary, he must be forever wondering why no one else liked it and why it didn't make any money.  Hence this "uncanny valley" definition comes in, and seems to fill that hole.  Wondering just what other critics thought, I checked the Rotten Tomatoes page, and surprise surprise, one of the first quoted major critic reviews is from Salon, and it backs up Ebert's uncanny valley concept perfectly.

But after you're done marveling at the characters' semirealistic way of moving and the freckles and minor imperfections that dot their skin (Dr. Sid boasts a prodigious number of liver spots -- get that guy some Porcelana!), it's all too easy to get hung up on the things that make them seem clumsy and awkward. When they speak -- the characters get some primo "Pearl Harbor"-style dialogue along the lines of "There is a war going on. No one is young anymore" -- their mouths just can't wrap themselves around the words. They look at each other and their gazes don't quite meet -- there's something a little blank, even slightly cross-eyed, about them. Their movements are generally smooth, but there's also something creepily artificial about them: They're a little like an ubermodern cross between traditional Japanimation and the old Thunderbirds puppets -- kind of close to real, but ultimately just high-tech marionettes.

So this critic at least fell deep into the uncanny valley.

Having read quite a few LotR:RotK reviews, and all of the negative ones (online) I didn't see anyone who said this about Gollum, at least not to the point that it ruined the movie for them.  I did see some bitching about him in TTT, and lots of bitching about the way the Ents looked.  For me at least, the Ents looked perfectly real.  I mean they were talking trees; how are they supposed to look?  Gollum is a bigger stretch, since he's humanoid, basically a mutated hobbit, so you can sort of relate how he looks to how the hobbits could/should look if they were mutated.  And by that metric he's not quite perfect; I thought his head was too big and his eyes much too large, like how had his eye sockets swelled so much?  But he was good enough in every other way; movement, character interaction, voice, lip synch, etc, that the overall effect was convincing enough.

There are lots of other recent movies we can consider. The Matrix 2 and 3 for instance, but especially #2 with the big brawl featuring Neo vs. 100 Agent Smiths.  It was almost entirely CG, with Neo's character and the Agents all basically a video game.  And I think that worked against the film; it was realistic, but not quite realistic enough.  It never felt like a really urgent fight, just a huge spectacle.  Compare it to the bloody fight in the subway in the Matrix 1, where there was no CG at all, other than some of the special effects and superfast punching speed stuff.  That fight worked very well, since it had weight and pain and felt real.  When they got hit you could feel the impact.  Not so for the rubbery, bouncing Neo and 100 Smiths in the Matrix 2 playground battle.

Another example is Spider-Man. It was very popular, but I found the movie pretty mediocre (I've never seen it again since the theaters.) and thought the action scenes, especially ones of Spidey swinging around the city, were very fake.  He was like a rubber ball or a plastic toy or a video game prop; moving far too quickly and weightlessly to look realistic, and that stuff really took me out of the movie.  They did a better job in Matrix 2 of making the Neo and the Smiths seem to have weight and gravity, but it still looked essentially fake, too fast, too bouncy, too many camera spins.

The Hulk had a ton of CG, but it was pretty universally disliked.  They spent so much time and money and effort on the big green guy, but he never looked even remotely human to me, and all I've ever seen are the previews and the trailer.  Malaya saw the movie and said it was just awful; so fake that you never had any human empathy for the Hulk at all, since he was just this big bouncing steroidal Gumby thing.

Going back a few years, the next example is, inevitably, Jar Jar, who is perhaps the most hated movie character of all time, CG or other. He was famously CG at the time, and revolutionary, but I don't recall much of the dislike for him being based on his appearance and artificial nature.  He was just loathsome, annoying, and a walking minstrel show.  I didn't see Episode 1 in theaters, put off by all of the hype and then the bad reviews, so my first viewing of it was when my dad taped it off of HBO.  By that time I'd read all about it and the Jar Jar flack, and watched it looking to see the racist aspects of him.  I didn't think there was much to that, until the very end of the movie after the ridiculous battle with the walking desk lamps, when the Gungan parade high-stepped it into town, looking like an exaggerated caricature of the black college bands you mostly see on halftime shows.  At that point all of Jar Jar's "meesa"'s started to sound a lot like, "massah"'s, and yeah, it seemed pretty racist.  Or if not racist, at least trading on the old stereotype of black performers.  Whether or not that was intentional by Lucas and his animators is open to debate, but I don't think the uncanny resemblance is less than clear at this point.

The minstrel show aspects of Jar Jar and his peoples aside, he was just horrid.  Annoying, slapstickish, and painful to watch.  I don't think that was due to his animated nature though.  It was due to the awful writing that made him such an annoying character.  Annoying to adults, at least.

I've often heard that kids liked or loved Jar Jar, or didn't see anything wrong or weird about him.  He wasn't a glaring, non-serious note in an otherwise sporadically-watchable film to them.  Just for adults.  Which lead Malaya to wonder if the uncanny valley thing applies to kids, or just to adults.  I don't think it's been studied, but kids are far more accepting of oddities in appearance or behavior than adults are, so they'd probably have less issue with it.  After all, how many movies have a weird monster that adults hate but that kids accept?  Frankenstein's escaped monster meets the young girl and finds a friend, or ET hides with the kids, for example.

You can also look at modern animation. Most adults find a lot of it "ugly," while kids love it.  I've always liked cartoons of every type, yet I can't sit through the movie trailer for any Rugrats movie without marveling at how intentionally unattractive the animation is.  It's painful to my eyes. As are the few brief moments I've ever seen of Spongebob Squarepants.  They're just ugly; it's a purely aesthetic judgment that has nothing to do with the writing or plot or character (which I've never seen enough of to form an opinion of).

On the other hand, Ren and Stimpy was the first cartoon I know of to use ugly and hyper-realistic drawings of gross things, and I grew to like that one.  I didn't find it entertaining or funny or enjoyable when they'd go from the normal look of the cartoon to some super close up of a huge hair pustule on Stimpy's ass, but it didn't make me want to turn the show off, at least not once I grew to expect it.

And I'm sure I'd soon grow to not mind the ugly animation of Rugrats or Spongebob, if I could tolerate the plot/writing long enough for that to happen. It's just an odd choice to draw a whole cartoon in such an ugly style, when the animators could, in theory, make it look more conventional.  And perhaps less popular, since the art work style wouldn't stand out so immediately to everyone.  The adult analogy I think of is Ted Rall's work, since he draws in a very ugly, rough style that's immediately recognizable.  However since he draws nasty political cartoons, the ugly artwork style works for him and seems appropriate.

This has gone far afield, in the best Fluxblog style, and I'm not sure if I have any overall point.  Probably not. I do find the uncanny valley concept interesting though, and I'm sure I'll carry that with me as I see upcoming films with CG characters. However I don't think I've ever rejected a nearly-human CG character since they were nearly, but not quite, human.  Perhaps as the technology continues to advance we'll get some more examples that will really show us which side of the uncanny valley line we come down on.

At this point the best example probably is Final Fantasy, since that's about the only movie to have CG characters who were supposed to pass for human. Gollum was close, but obviously mutated and weird looking, Jar Jar was not at all human, the Hulk was huge and green, Roger Rabbit was a cartoon, Yoda (in Episode 2) was small and green, etc. We'll have to see how it goes with a CG character who is virtually human in appearance... Of course the question there is, "Why?"  Why spend the money and time and trouble to make a CG character look like a human when you could just use a real human actor in the first place, and enhance him, or put makeup on him, or whatever?  At this point, man in suit is still the best option for realism, even if it's man in suit spiffed up with some CG on top.

But as the technology advances, who knows?

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