Character and Narrative: The Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis in that a character or robot can look so human like and move like a human but can be so creepy at the same time. The more realistic you make something the more creepier it will get until you get it to exactly human like. The Uncanny Valley was first identified by a roboticist in Japan named Masahiro Mori in 1970, who said the the more human and life like in the robots appearance and behaviour, the more creepier it would appear, but won't stay like that because it would move to a certain point, in which people would start having weird feelings about the character and sees it differently. This is what 'The Uncanny Valley' is.

Some good examples of the uncanny valley are when you watch movies and see that the animators have used motion captor suites to try and achieve the most human like look in a character, but then there's just something about the character then that makes people feel uncomfortable. One of the movies that make you feel like that it the 'Polar Express' because all the characters have been creacted using CGI and because of that it made the characters have emotionless eyes so they look kind of zombified, which is creepy when you think about it because this film was made for kids.

Another movies which has unfortunately the uncanny valley is the 'Hulk' movie, the 2003 Eric Bana/ Ang Lee version. In this movie the hulk looks like he is made out of modelling clay, plus it had terrifying hulk like dogs and a CGI Nick Nolte.