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Pixar and the Uncanny Valley

In addition to their focus on a well-told story over a star-studded, a-list cast, an article in the New York Times, A Part-Human, Part-Cartoon Species, illustrates why Pixar’s latest film, The Incredibles, aesthetically rises above the rest of Hollywood’s 3D animated fare.

The article discusses director Brad Bird’s dedication to refining the look and movement of the movie’s characters to be, ultimately, cartoonish in nature.  One of the reasons I don’t like Shrek is that the human characters have no, well, character to them.  They look too human, and not like cartoons at all, and so have a stiff, “dead doll” quality to them.  The same goes for the human characters in the Toy Story movies.

The moment I saw the trailer for The Incredibles, I knew that Pixar had done something that no 3D film had done yet—they had created human characters that had some style to them and that didn’t try to emulate life.  I agree with Bird in that those who think that creating something absolutely lifelike with animation are missing the point.  What’s great about the characters in The Incredibles is that they are first and foremost cartoons.  They look like they’ve jumped out of a Chuck Jones short or something Disney might have produced in the 60’s.

This uneasy feeling with characters that are “too human” is something that I think has a lot to do with a theory in robotics called the Uncanny Valley.  Basically, the theory states that people feel a certain affection and comfort towards objects that have certain anthropomorphic qualities to them.  Applied to robotics, people gradually begin to feel more comfortable when robots have a higher level of anthropomorphism, and more closely resemble people.

However, there is a dip in the curve when the robots too closely resemble people.  We feel uneasy and creeped out by robots that are too human.  But then the curve suddenly spikes back to a high level of comfort when robotics has achieved perfect mimicry of a living human.  This dip in the curve is called “the uncanny valley” and it’s where, I believe, the human characters from Shrek and Toy Story lie.

Finding the perfect balance between being human and being a cartoon has finally been realized in three-dimensional animation, and I am excited like a kid at Christmas for this movie.  Pixar + superheroes + Brad Bird = one giddy robot.

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