What's wrong with this picture? Go with your first instinct (this isn't a Health and safety questionnaire), yes, the real wrong is the wrong-ness of the way the kid looks... Someone spent a lot of time on their computer generating him, and he's neither "lifelike" or "cute", he's just wrong. He's creepy. When you see a good CGI film, ie any Pixar* except 'Cars', they have funny looking people... but they're funny in a good way... even in the magnificent 'Toys Story 3,' the human are the characters you wouldn't pay to see, but they are at least good enough. Robert Zemeckis however, thought he could do humans, see below... that's "Tom Hanks" in both pics. First, wearing his Motion Tracking get-up and, lower, in Zemeckis's "Polar Express'. They showed the film on TV last Christmas. I watched it for a handful of minutes and wondered why the hell they bothered... probably took them years too!
This wrongness I just thought was called bad art, but the Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori has stepped in and labelled it 'The Uncanny Valley'. His observation is applicable to interactions with nearly any non-human entity (and this is why I'm blogging about it!)
If one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend, instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete. Here's a graph!
For me Tom Hanks represents a point at the lowest place on the deepest chasm and a great lesson in how not to animate. Mind you, "unhealthy person" being that high doesn't seem right...
* I have read even the Pixar gods had a skirmish with the Uncanny Valley with their early short 'Tin Toy'. Sure that baby is fugly, but it was an experiment, and they never made that mistake again. Compare it with Big Baby from Toy Story 3!
Graph courtesy: http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/nonfiction/uncanny-valley.html
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