When real is too real.

I watched Over the Hedge the other day, and must confess to having rather enjoyed it, but it made me wonder when we’re going to see a proper animation along the lines of Final Fantasy: Spirits of Every Good SciFi Movie Plot. Over the Hedge is chock full of anthropomorphic animals cracking wise, pulling goofy faces and getting into all manner of hijinks. Much like the Toy Story series, Shrek, Chicken Little, Monsters Inc, Antz, Shark Tale, Robots, In the Wild/Madagascar, Bug’s Life, Ice Age and so on. Soon we’ll also have anthropomorphic cars in Cars, and even more animals in Open Season. And if Shrek 1&2 hadn’t raped fairytales enough for you, please don’t fret as the necrophiliac Hoodwinked is coming along to roger what’s left of that corpse. Hooray!

Hoodwinked: We Couldn't Be Bothered With Decent Looking Animation

How good would it be though to have a people-based animation from Dreamworks, Pixar or Disney, but one with realism. Sure Sully was blue and purple, but his fur looked and moved like hair. And shit, it was years ago when Final Fantasy: We Rip Off Plots But It’s Animated So That’s Ok first came out. The Incredibles did a great job, but the animation in that movie was kept unrealistic on purpose. There are no faults in The Incredibles. Move along.

What I would like though is all that awesome rendering power to make a movie that’s animated but with human characters in it. Just for once, you know, to give us a break from cutesy fucking animals and such.

Only, there’s a problem with introducing too much reality into a completely rendered or manufactured person, and it’s called the Uncanny Valley.

While the Uncanny Valley sounds like the nickname some incomplete gender reassignment transvestite from Singapore’s famous clap trap The Orchard Towers gives his vagina, it actually refers to the tipping point where a human-like android with realistic facial expression and movement becomes so real that the figure turns from something that is no longer lovingly anthropomorphic but into something terrifyingly inhuman and ungodly.

This still sounds like the trannies at the Four Floors of Whores, but with the Uncanny Valley the more realistic the creation the greater the repulsion felt. Transgender vagina jokes aside, the Uncanny Valley it seems, is frighteningly deep.

Animated animals are easier to mess about with, as fur overlaid on the model’s skin hides a multitude of sins, much like my hair hides my 666 birthmark. Seriously though, deformation of an animated human model can often stretch the skin texture making for stretched moles or scars. Humans, it seems, are extremely difficult to render properly. And the more proper they are rendered, the more improper our reaction to them becomes.

Which is really sad, because shows like Battlestar Galactica have shown me a possible and glorious future, filled with sex-bots. Or something.

The future