Character ability to appeal to us, the audience, from the way it performs to the relationship it is established with us. Is the 12th principle of animation and it is not just the physical features but also the way it acts, the personality or its history. In animation the appeal of a character can be compared to the charisma of an actor. Appeal is critical in the audience association with the character creating interest and concern. The characters appeal can also concern villain or monsters. Essentially the character feels real and convincing.

what visual components or aspects of a character might achieve this? Eyes for examples, big eyes create appeal of character because we associate them with puppies and babies.

To establish the key aspects of the character to generate appeal are their role in the narrative or their performance, how they communicate within the narrative and to the audience, their personality, their individual traits or skills, their attire and their biography and backstory. These are all elements that help us relate to the characters.

Realism and the uncanny valley

“Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” SIGMUND FREUD

When something becomes familiar but it is not quite right it becomes disturbing. Sometimes we can go to further down with realism of a character, adding a sinister aspect to them which we accept but don’t quite come across easily: this is because it is in the uncanny valley.

The story of the uncanny valley goes back to the tale from t.a. Hoffmann the sandman in 1816 tells the story of a young student who falls into madness when he realizes he has fallen in love with a robot. A hundred years later Sigmund Freud wrote his paper on ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche). His theory was rooted in everyday experiences and the aesthetics of popular culture, related to what is frightening, repulsive and distressing. The paper tackles the horrific concepts of inanimate figures coming to life, severed limbs, ghosts, the image of the double figure (doppelgaengers) and lends itself to art, literature and cinema. Freud’s essay is written in two parts. The first part explores the etymology of the words ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’ (or ‘homely’ and ‘unhomely’, as it directly translates into English), their uses in the German dictionary and how these words are used in other languages. In the second part, Freud begins to tackle people, things, self-expressions, experiences and situations that best represent the uncanny feeling.

This concept of uncanny valley was firstly identified by the robotics professor Mashiro Mori in 1970. He made prosthetic limbs and made them realistic but if they were too realistic people tended to back off. it took almost 8 years before the concept introduced by Mashiro Mori took international attention since it was linked to to the word uncanny which unintentionally linked Mori’s finding to “the uncanny” the essay from Sigmund Freud.

”the uncanny valley in aesthetic and psychology is a range of appearances. Mannerism, and/or behaviors of a humanoid figure that are subtly different from human and thereby cause feeling of discomfort such as fear or revulsion.”

It describes the region of negative emotional response towards robots that seem “almost” human. Movement amplifies the emotional response. This theory predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.

If robots have human like features they tend to be more likeable and the human response is positive e and empathetic but when they are too close for comfort and the human traits are pushed too far and you can’t almost spot the difference is when they become uncanny: you can’t almost say if it is real or not and that is what causes discomfort and revulsion.

why do we have this feeling? there could be three possible reasons:

• mate selection: we don’t consider the robot as a possible partner and we reject the idea of it

• mortality salient: the humanoid reminds of our own mortality

• violation of human norm: we judge the situation as a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.

Passing the uncanny valley is something that the movie and the game industries have been trying to achieve for years.

However the uncanny valley could be generational, young generations are more acquainted with cgi and robots so they might not be affected by it.