A recent article in The Guardian noted that the perennial concept of the ‘uncanny valley’ has rolled around once more – when human ‘replicas’ cross the line and become too real. At such a moment, we recognise them as neither fake nor real, and become involuntarily repulsed by them – the corresponding dip in empathy is the uncanny valley.
There are some clear and obvious examples of this, all of which are cited in the article, but it is the “re-imagining” of Tintin where The Guardian claims the ‘uncanny valley’ can be found in full effect.
“Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson hope to make Tintin a global household name with their new animated extravaganza, but in the process, they have brought another obscure term into the mainstream: the uncanny valley. The phrase has cropped up a lot in early reviews of The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, referring to the strange effect created when animated characters look eerily lifelike. As New York magazine put it: “Tintin looks simultaneously too human and not human at all, his face weirdly fetal, his eyes glassy and vacant instead of bursting with animated life.” Many others have agreed.” (Read full article)
Shiven Sharma from the University of Ottawa, Canada, begs to differ, and – in an article from the Wall Street Journal - claims that the reproduction of Tintin remains sufficiently stylised to keep us off the valley floor: “Our mind is more accepting of stylized representations. That’s why the Tintin movie looks so good. They’ve made photorealistic people out of the comic books. But they’re Tintin people—the way they’re shaded, and the way they’re proportioned, is all made to have the same visual style that Hergé created in the comic.”
Whether it is CGI, sculpture, photorealism or any other artform that aims to perfectly capture the human form, the graph below shows us where we might run into trouble. If our creation is moving, that’s clearly more problematic. If they happen to exhibit the physical traits of a zombie, then you’re going to find yourself plummeting right to the depths of that valley. Perhaps Spielberg and Jackson should just bite the bullet and go the distance with this thing – I think Zombie Tintin might well have a better run at the Box Office than the current incarnation.
The graph comes from Wikipedia‘s entry on the uncanny valley, wherein they note: “The name captures the idea that an almost human-looking robot will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction“. That has to be my favourite phrase of the week – let us all pause for reflection on what “productive human-robot interaction” may actually entail.
