3D Potential and Limitations: Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of aesthetics which holds that when features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers. The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of beings as subjects move toward a healthy, natural likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics and 3D computer animation, among others.
A number of films that use computer-generated imagery to show characters have been described by reviewers as giving a feeling of revulsion or "creepiness" as a result of the characters looking too realistic.  Examples include:

According to roboticist Dario Floreano, the animated baby in Pixar's groundbreaking 1988 short film Tin Toy provoked negative audience reactions, which first led the film industry to take the concept of the uncanny valley seriously.

(the baby from Pixars Tin Toy, 1988)

The 2001 film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first photorealistic computer-animated feature film, provoked negative reactions from some viewers due to its near-realistic yet imperfect visual depictions of human characters.The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw stated that while the film's animation is brilliant, the "solemnly realist human faces look shriekingly phoney precisely because they're almost there but not quite". Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers wrote of the film, "At first it's fun to watch the characters, but then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements".

(Characters from Fival Fantasy: Spirits Within, 2001)

Several reviewers of the 2004 animated film The Polar Express called its animation eerie.  CNN.com reviewer Paul Clinton wrote, "Those human characters in the film come across as downright... well, creepy.  So The Polar Express is at best disconcerting, and at worst, a wee bit horrifying."   The term "eerie" was used by reviewers Kurt Loder and Manohla Dargis,among others. Newsday reviewer John Anderson called the film's characters "creepy" and "dead-eyed", and wrote that "The Polar Express is a zombie train." Animation director Ward Jenkins wrote an online analysis describing how changes to the Polar Express characters' appearance, especially to their eyes and eyebrows, could have avoided what he considered a feeling of deadness in their faces.

(a screenshot from The Polar Express, 2004)

In a review of the 2007 animated film Beowulf, New York Times technology writer David Gallagher wrote that the film failed the uncanny valley test, stating that the film's villain, the monster Grendel, was "only slightly scarier" than the "closeups of our hero Beowulf’s face... allowing viewers to admire every hair in his 3-D digital stubble."

(Grendel from Beowulf, 2007)

Some reviewers of the 2009 film A Christmas Carol criticized its animation as being creepy. Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News said of the film, "The motion-capture does no favors to co-stars (Gary) Oldman, Colin Firth and Robin Wright Penn, since, as in 'Polar Express,' the animated eyes never seem to focus. And for all the photorealism, when characters get wiggly-limbed and bouncy as in standard Disney cartoons, it's off-putting". Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon.com wrote of the film, "In the center of the action is Jim Carrey -- or at least a dead-eyed, doll-like version of Carrey".

In the 2010 film The Last Airbender, the character Appa, the flying bison, has been called "uncanny".  Geekosystem's Susana Polo found the character "really quite creepy", noting "that prey animals (like bison) have eyes on the sides of their heads, and so moving them to the front without changing rest of the facial structure tips us right into the uncanny valley".

(Appa from the movie The Last Airbender, 2010)

The 2011 film Mars Needs Moms was widely criticized for being creepy and unnatural because of its style of animation. The film was the second biggest box office bomb in history, which may have been due in part to audience revulsion.(Mars Needs Moms was produced by Robert Zemeckis's production company, ImageMovers, which had previously produced The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol.)

By contrast, at least one film, the 2011 The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, was praised by reviewers for avoiding the uncanny valley despite its animated characters' realism.  Critic Dana Stevens wrote, "With the possible exception of the title character, the animated cast of Tintin narrowly escapes entrapment in the so-called 'uncanny valley.'" Wired Magazine editor Kevin Kelly wrote of the film, "we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the plains of hyperreality