In this most recent entry at NPR's
13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, philosopher Alva Noë looks at animation, narrative, and psychological reality.
Many an animated character wouldn't seem so unreal and dead if it didn't seem so real and alive!
This is a puzzle that has long troubled animators. If you saw Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express, you know what I'm talking about. Remember the dead eyes of the characters, their zombie-like vacancy?
Animators do an excellent job bringing the nonhuman to life on the screen — think of WALL-E, or the enchanted broomsticks in Fantasia, not to mention Mickey Mouse himself — but they falter with the more realistically human. And isn't hard to see why.
As Lawrence Weschler, who takes up this topic in the lead essay of his excellent new book Uncanny Valley: Adventures in Narrative, puts it:
"When
a replicant's almost completely human, the slightest variance, the 1
percent that's not quite right, suddenly looms up enormously rendering
the entire effect somehow creepy and monstrously alien (no longer, that
is, an incredibly lifelike machine but rather a human being with
something inexplicably wrong ..."
This
precipitous drop off in psychological reality, or in normalcy, as you
get close to verisimilitude, but not close enough, was first dubbed "the
uncanny valley" in 1970 by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori.
As
Weschler suggests, good story telling (supported by effective sound and
music) is enough to make even the dumbest doorstop think and feel on
the screen. So maybe the uncanny valley has something to do with
storytelling?
This is certainly not the
preferred approach, which targets technology and the human perceptual
system, rather than art, to explain the uncanny valley. The preferred
approach goes like this:
What makes
animation possible in the first place is our evolved tendency to see
mind where there is none (on a sock puppet, or in a line drawing). This
tendency runs counter to another basic cognitive trait, our natural
hyper-sensitivity to even the most subtle inflections of face, posture,
movement. The uncanny valley opens up because these two dispositions
collide: we experience the mind behind the animated humanlike face —
just as we can project mind onto a teddy bear — but we can't help but
experience it as in some way deviant; as "a human being with something
inexplicably wrong."
Two interesting
upshots. First, on this approach, if animators want to bridge the
uncanny valley, they'd better find a way to cover that last 1 percent;
they'd better find ways more effectively to replicate that complex
choreography of eyes, skin, bone, mouth and muscle that is the genuine,
animate human face.
Second, there's no
obstacle in principle to bridging the valley. It's just a matter of
time, money and research collaboration between animators and cognitive
scientists.
Now I find the suggestion
that our experience of a narrative work of art could be the result of
the blind operation of the visual system highly implausible. Remember,
we aren't talking about real face perception here. We're talking about
animated movies. We're talking about story telling! Maybe Weschler is
right that story telling is the key.
Consider
this: the story-telling art forms — here, for the sake of brevity, I
consider only film, writing and animated film — are each driven by and
capitalize on different feelings, different stances, different kinds of
desires on the part of the audience.
The
basic impulse driving film as a storytelling art is the impulse to
look, see, and watch; when it comes to film, we like to peep and spy.
Film is the voyeuristic art. Of course we know,
intellectually, that what we see, when we watch a film, is the work of
directors, producers, technicians, etc. But the thrill, the magic, the
excitement of the movies comes from the feeling that we have a
transparent window onto the lives of others. Our primitive stance is
that of the witness.
Fiction writing is
altogether different. We may read fiction with voracious appetites, but
when we do so we do not take up the stance of the voyeur, at least not
typically. No, fiction is an act of telling and what we
encounter, or seem to encounter, when we read a novel, is the story
teller. I don't mean the author, or even, necessarily, the narrator.
Exactly who or what we encounter is very often in no way self-evident
and the fun may stem from working it out. It remains the case, though,
that what is revealed to us, exposed, in works of fiction, is not worlds
that we seem directly to experience, as in the case of film, but,
rather, the mind of the teller. Fiction is a testimonial art (and
whereas film is a cult of the actor, fiction is a cult of the writer).
Now
we come to cartoons. They occupy a third position still. The underlying
impulse behind our fascination with animation is not the impulse to
watch, nor is it the impulse to understand the story or the story
teller; it is, rather, the impulse to play. Cartoons put us in the mood for play, and we do not so much watch as we participate. Cartoons are the playful art.
Back to the uncanny valley. A movie like The Polar Express traps
us in a kind of rhetorical contradiction. In so far as the characters
resemble living human beings, we are invited to take an interest in
them; we feel the impulse to watch them; we are invited to take up the
stance to them that would be appropriate to live-action movies. But in
so far as we are watching what is manifestly an animated film, then we
are at one and the same time pulled to take up the altogether opposed
attitude appropriate to animation, that namely of viewing the characters
as mere play things. We're caught in a rhetorical contradiction: real
living human beings are not play things; toys are not the sort of thing
we are thrilled to watch.
Cartoons
don't give us glimpses of worlds, they give us worlds to play in and
toys to play with. Live-action movies, in contrast, don't give us
opportunities to play; they give us access to hidden worlds. Here, then,
is what I propose: the uncanny valley yawns not when animators fall
short in their rendering of the human body — even if in fact they do —
but rather when they get confused about what kinds of stories they are
telling: Are they inviting audiences to play, or giving them an
opportunity to watch? In this confusion, the story dies, and with it,
the light in the eyes of the characters.
You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.
Warner Brothers: Hero Boy — played by Tom Hanks — in The Polar Express
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