Uncanny Valley - Use in The Media

Use in The Media

• In Isaac Asimov's short story "Evidence" from 1946, in which a lawyer is suspected of being a humanoid robot, Dr. Calvin says that people have been observing humans all their lives, and therefore "it would be impossible to palm something merely nearly right off on us".

• Roboticist Dario Floreano notes that the concept of the uncanny valley is taken seriously by the film industry due to the negative audience reactions to the animated baby in Pixar's 1988 short film Tin Toy.

• In the 2008 30 Rock episode "Succession", Frank Rossitano explains the uncanny valley concept, using a graph and Star Wars examples, to try to convince Tracy Jordan that his dream of creating a pornographic video game is impossible. He also references the computer animated film The Polar Express.

• In reviewing The Polar Express in 2004, CNN.com reviewer Paul Clinton references his uncanny valley response directly: "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."

• In the Doctor Who serial The Robots of Death (1977), a similar concept is referred to as "Grimwade's Syndrome" which is described as a psychological condition among people with frequent contact with robots, attributed to the robots moving like humans, but without any of the characteristic human body language. In the mind of those afflicted, they appear to be, in the words of the Doctor, "surrounded by walking, talking dead men".

• Episode 12 (season 5) of Criminal Minds (2010) is titled "The Uncanny Valley" and explores the theme through the lens of a serial abductress (and murderess) who chemically paralyzes the women she abducts and treats them like dolls.

• In the season 6 episode of Red Dwarf, "Out of Time" (1993), Kryten alludes to the uncanny valley as the reason his faceted head was designed to look so inhuman. The series of mechanoids that preceded his were hyper-realistic, and people's natural revulsion to such realistic-appearing machines severely hurt their sales.

• The 1972 satirical thriller The Stepford Wives and its 1975 and 2004 movie adaptations implicitly feature the concept of the uncanny valley. After the story's protagonist moves to a suburban residence, she notices increasingly uncharacteristic behavior by the other women in her community. As they become more docile, wholly subjecting their behavior and ambitions to the needs of their male partners, she begins to suspect a conspiracy where the human females are being replaced by gynoids.

• Reviews of the 2009 CGI movie Avatar, have mentioned uncanny valley, when referring to the CGI human like alien characters.

• In the 2010 film The Last Airbender, Appa the flying bison, which is a CGI character based on a character of the same name in the television series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, has been called "uncanny". Geekosystem's Susana Polo found the CGI version of Appa "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".

• In the 1968 short story "Masks" by Damon Knight, a man is described as being the subject of a project in which individuals are to have their consciousness transplanted into whole-body prostheses. While the prosthetic allows him a broad range of normal ‘human’ functions, he is fully aware that the prosthetic’s features remain fundamentally inhuman; during discussions with members of the development team, he criticizes the lack of realism of the prosthetic body in terms that strongly suggest an uncanny-valley effect: “The first model looked like a tailor's dummy; so you spent eight months and came up with this one, and it looks like a corpse.” He is described as experiencing bitter frustration and anger when observing the typical facial and bodily imperfections displayed by normal humans and mammals, even to the point of psychotic rage at the sight of a puppy.

• The 2011 release of The Adventures of Tintin used advances in CGI technology to bring characters out of the uncanny valley. Movie critic Dana Stevens states "With the possible exception of the title character, the animated cast of Tintin narrowly escapes entrapment in the so-called 'uncanny valley.'" While some movie critics continue to argue that the film remains in the uncanny valley, Kevin Kelly postulates that "we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the plains of hyperreality."