The Uncanny Valley

Whilst 3D Animation is becoming more and more advanced, and thanks to movies such as Toy Story,  Avatar, Lord of The Rings and more, we can see how extensive its capabilities are. However, it is easy to forget that a to of these successful examples of 3D animation don't necessarily focus on realism as such.

One of the biggest problems with 3D animation is that, achieving an exact replica of a human being, is probably one of the most complex and time consuming things an animator can do. There have been cases where 3D animated human like characters lack certain qualities and don't quite hit the point of realism and instead can sometimes result in looking rather odd or scary. This lovely dip is known as "The Uncanny Valley"

This graph clearly shown the development of a character. It begins well, but there comes a point where it goes from looking like a good generation of a human being, as we can see the "human likeness" and "familiarity" plummet off the graph, which clearly suggest something is not right. 

 The Polar Express, which was released in 2004 and Directed by Robert Zemeckis is a really well known example of "The Uncanny Valley." The characters in this film, often look as though their emotion is forced and they look very dead behind the eyes. It is easy to tell that the aim of this method of animating was to create realistic, human like characters, but instead they have resulted in looking slightly creepy.

In my opinion, there hasn't been enough attention paid to the detail and animation of the eyes, I think the characters in this look completely out of it and to be honest they make me feel slightly uneasy!

In this clip above, you can tell straight away that the animation is very unrealistic. When the characters speak, the emotion and movement in the face doesn't really come through. The body language as a whole is very rigid. As an animator I can't believe I'm saying this, but I believe it would have been much better as live action!