Tom Gunning The Uncanny Valley

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The human brain, no matter how unobservant it may seem, can subconsciously notice even the slightest of inconsistencies and feel uneasy. This inherent capability can turn into a fatal flaw in terms of animation as a visual medium. Famed writer Lawrence Weschler anecdotally elaborates upon this hamartia, speaking of how a glass of milk once made viewers of an animated short film feel uncomfortable entirely due to its lack of a meniscus (the infinitesimal bend at the milk’s surface when viewed through a glass cup). Thus, animators are forced to “marvel both at the tiniest of details and at the human capacity (nay propensity!) for noticing those tiniest of details.” This effect is the most prominent when it comes to the concept of the Uncanny …show more content…

In fact, Tom Gunning, renowned film theoretician, argues that the synthetic man motion capture “destroys, as it replaces, ‘the image of the free and intact man.’” Gunning continues on to argue that creating virtual humans through motion capture, a simulacra, reduces them to an assembly of bits. According to Gunning, these bit combinations prove that man is neither free-willed nor ‘intact’ as he was when God created him. While the overall intricacies of this argument make for personal philosophical debates, the simple and basic summary of Gunning’s thesis is reducing man to computer code renders free will an intrinsic falsehood and thus—as man must be inherently free-willed—motion capture will never surmount the Uncanny Valley. Gunning claims that motion capture is merely a spectacle, that it is intentionally destructive and merely a “simulacrum of consciousness.” Continuing down Gunning’s argument, he argues “contemporary CGI and digital manipulation [blend] imperceptibly into familiar realities, spectacular special effects films practically visualize the fantastic.” He finishes his argument with a significant duality, claiming, that “at their best the new techniques of digital effects do more than simply reproduce the familiar human body; they offer not only fantastic variations on the human body…[but, in addition] its ability to endow matter with an inner life, a sense of soul.” In essence, Gunning argues that as animation can never truly recreate a human being it animates unfamiliar concepts additionally (such as matter or animals) to provide a spectacle to audiences. And, this mixture of the familiarity of a human figure and the unfamiliarity of this additional animation is what creates the Freudian Uncanny

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