This process was so time consuming and expen-
sive that it contributed to the failure of the film’s
production company. Nonetheless, Final Fantasy
set the standard for digitally animated human
characters. But for many animators and audiences,
“realistic” figures are not necessarily the ideal. In
2004, the stylized characters in Pixar’s blockbuster
The Incredibles(director: Brad Bird) trumped the
motion-capture-guided “lifelike” figures in Robert
Zemeckis’s The Polar Expressin both box-office and
critical response.
Although there are many other potential reasons
that audiences and analysts preferred The Incredi-
bles, the key issue for many critics was an unset-
tling feeling that they couldn’t shake while
watching the characters in The Polar Express—a
feeling that the whole thing wasn’t heartwarming or
endearing, but was instead simply creepy. Among
fans of computer-generated imagery, there was
considerable debate about why, exactly, The Polar
Expressleft so many viewers feeling weird and
uncomfortable rather than filled with the holiday
spirit. Eventually, on blogs and Listservs all over
the Internet, a consensus was reached: The Polar
Expresshad fallen into the “uncanny valley.”
The uncanny valley is a theoretical concept first
described in 1970 by a Japanese robotics engineer,
Masahiro Mori. It states that the closer an object
(a robot, an animated character) comes to resem-
bling a human being in its motion and appearance,
the more positive our emotional response to that
object becomes until suddenly, at some point of
very close (but not perfect) resemblance, our emo-
tional response turns from empathy to revulsion.
This revulsion or uneasiness, Mori says, is the
result of a basic human tendency to look for anom-
alies in the appearance of other human beings.
When an object such as a robot or an animated114 CHAPTER 3TYPES OF MOVIES
PersepolisWhile digital animation now dominates the
animated movie market, hand-drawn films like Persepolis
(2007) still garner popular and critical attention. Marjane
Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood and adolescence in Iran
and Paris (codirected with Vincent Paronnaud) broke with
commercial animation practices by combining its adult
subject matter with graphic, mostly black-and-white
drawings that emphasized a two-dimensional universe.