I recently saw the trailer for The Polar Express, a 3D-animated movie based on the picture book. Ewwww! It looks like it’s filled with creepy, lifeless robots. A Japanese researcher, Masahiro Mori, explored the concept of robotic design and used the very evocative phrase “the Uncanny Valley” to explain human psychological reaction to humanoid designs.
In short, as an artificial humanoid object (robot, 3D figure) gets closer to human appearance (ie looks, movement), people have a higher and higher empathetic response towards it, until it hits a certain point, whereupon people find it disquieting and even creepy–this is the realm of the Uncanny Valley. This would explain why a vaguely humanoid robot (eg C-3P0) can be appealing, while the super-realistic animated people in some 3D movies/ads etc are totally off-putting. In contrast, Pixar seems to be going in the right direction with The Incredibles–they’re using 3D human characters, but they’re deliberately cartoony, so they can move in a dynamic, cartoon fashion. And in doing this they look waay more “realistic” than any of those dead people in The Polar Express.
Jun
12
No comment yet
Reid says:
June 17, 2004 at 12:02 pm (UTC 0)
Ya! When I saw that I thought I was looking aat some student’s SIGGRAPH entry or something. How did they let that make it all the way to the theatres? Maybe the completely non-human characters (elves, reindeer etc) make up for it?
Laura says:
June 17, 2004 at 9:51 pm (UTC 0)
Web trailers are usually crappy quality, so I didn’t think much of it one way or another (well, actually I did think it was kind of lame). But we saw it as the trailer in front of Harry Potter, and on the big screen it was absolutely horrifying.