The Uncanny Valley

articulated for film by Roger Ebert
edited: April 2009

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori developed the "uncanny valley" hypothesis, which states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. As the appearance and motion of the robot continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, however the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels. This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the uncanny valley.

Roger Ebert subsequently applied the uncanny valley to animation, observing that there is a chasm where an animated character is essentially too real to be fake, and too fake to be real, thus disrupting our ability as an audience to engage with the character.

Pixar-style 3-dimensional animated characters seem to exist particularly strongly within my own uncanny valley: "that uncomfortable space between photographic reality's instantaneous access to [my] sympathies, and the subconscious identification mechanisms that make simpler cartoons so easily engaging."