Uncanny Valley - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Nightmare Valley

If you see something that... looks human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and you feel for your hatchet.

- Mr. Beaver, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 once stated the more human a robot acted or looked, the more endearing it would be to a human being. For example, most lovable Robot Buddies look humanoid, but keep quirky and artistically mechanical affectations.

However, at some point, the likeness would seem too strong, and it would just come across as a very strange human being. At this point, the acceptance drops suddenly, changing to a powerful negative reaction.

When shown as a graph (see above), the acceptance on the Y axis and increasing X approaching human normal, there is a slow rise, then a sudden drop, then a sudden peak as "human normal" is reached. Masahiro Mori referred to this as the "uncanny valley".

Thus, things that look somewhat human, but are clearly not - such as C-3PO (in Star Wars) or a Golem - produce an accepting reaction, while things that are very nearly human, but just a little strange - such as a ventriloquist's puppet or a clown - produce a negative response. The very lowest point of the valley is the zombie, a living corpse.

The Uncanny Valley may be a deep, instinctual reaction; it steers humans, on an automatic level, away from humans who are dead, diseased, or deformed (which is often an indication of poor health). It may also alert "normal" people to the presence of mental problems which would render someone unfit for inclusion in a peer group. In that way, the theory goes, the Uncanny Valley is a protection against associating with sources of infection. Of course, it may also be a race memory of when Earth was invaded by department-store mannequins.

This might explain why we like Ridiculously Human Robots, even if they don't make a lot of intuitive sense; they are just far enough out of the Uncanny Valley not to bother us.

This idea has recently been applied to CG effects. While it's become very easy for programs to simulate textures and skin tones, convincing movement and facial expressions aren't always as simple. This can produce an effect where the character comes off as a zombie, if a production company is going for a purely realistic human look.

Similarly, many cartoons nowadays prefer a simultaneously stylized yet simplified character design, versus the "realistic" look amongst some older cartoons. In the latter, it’s more obvious the budget just didn’t allow characters to move much.

Heavily rotoscoped characters often seem less "real" than more stylized animated characters, especially when they're in the same production - see the Fleischer Studios version of Gulliver's Travels for an example.

Compare Reality Is Unrealistic, where the poor impression comes less from being 'creepy' as from breaking existing conventions which audiences had come to expect. See also Off Model, Bishonen Line, and Ugly Cute. And while you're at it, see What Measure Is A Non Cute as the scientific study of that trope gave birth to this one.

You'll notice that most the examples below have to do with inadvertently entering the Valley. This trope can also be used to purposefully make something creepy, where creepiness is called for.

Examples

Commercials

The King. (Burger King.) The mask is a reference to their campaign from the 70's, where a guy would dress up in "kingly" regalia and shill for burgers, in a predictably trippy fashion.An example.
Evil Dead Orville. (Orville Redenbacher popcorn.) Someone had the bright idea to use a real actor for his body, and to computer generate his head.
Mr. Six, the dancing man in the Six Flags commercials, a disturbing looking character with an equally disturbing mask for a face (the actual person under it is female. Here, have a shiver.
Nadine Baggott, Celebrity Beauty Editor.
In the UK, Lynx deodorant ran an advertising campaign in which a grinning man made entirely of chocolate broke off pieces of himself. The advert was eventually banned for being too disturbing.See it here. They're using the same ad for the American version, called Axe. It's still damn creepy.
This X-Box commercial.
The recent M&Ms ad campaign where several different celebrities are caricatured as odd and unsettling M&M characters. A review of the ads in Entertainment Weekly nailed it: "Who wants to eat candy with hair?"
Every single commercial in the PS 3 ad campaign, but in particular the baby commercial, seen here in all its horrifying, squeal-inducing glory.
- Indeed, filmmakers often fail to realize that babies are only appealing when they act like babies. See also that recent digital camera commercial where the pajama-clad children turn into creepy CGI acrobats. Not to mention "Baby Geniuses", "Ally Mc Beal", and "Son of the Mask".
The plastic Duracell family, the Puttermans.
Discovery Channel's Shark Week featured a cheery young man giving the camera a broad grin. He actually would be kinda cute were his mouth not filled with SHARK TEETH. Yeesh.

Film

When living humans are animated via stop-motion, the result is often creepy and unnatural. Doubly so if they are filmed moving deliberately slowly but with the camera running at high speed, so that they move at normal speed on playback but look all twitchy and deranged. See the remake of House on Haunted Hill for this in action.
The failure of the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was partially blamed on its characters being right in the Uncanny Valley. The rest of the blame could be chalked up to boredom. Somehow, the female lead was put in a Maxim Magazine "hottest women" list. Nice body aside, her skin looked like porcelain. Creepy. Especially given that "skin like porcelain" is supposed to be a compliment.
Square's next attempt, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children wisely dodged around this by giving its characters a subtly more stylised, animesque look. The use of motion-capture for more natural movement was probably a major plus, too.
The Polar Express, although more successful, skirted this trope. Many reviewers commented on the zombie-like appearance of the adult cast. Especially the ones voiced by Tom Hanks. The Cartoon Brew blog nailed it: "This holiday season, give your family Nightmares!"
In The Dark Crystal, the two Gelflings are the most human-looking characters - and the least convincing. Since they qualify as Petting Zoo People, however, they aren't quite as creepy as some of the other examples.
In the film adaptation of The Bicentennial Man, when the protagonist gets a new, completely realistic android face, every blink is regular and accompanied by a little whirr. Creepiest thing ever.
A classic example from Disney: In the original Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from 1937, Snow White is rotoscoped, while other characters are not. The character is the only one in the movie who looks "unnatural". Ironically, she is the only detail of this ground-breaking film that looks "old-fashioned" even though rotoscoping was considered cutting edge technology at the time. The Seven Dwarfs are recognizable instantly, but Snow White fades into the background when she isn't singing or dancing.
The producers of Shrek intentionally dialed down the realism of Fiona's skin due to the animators reportedly feeling a bit like they were animating a corpse.
Used for effect in Evil Dead 2 multiple times, notably during Ash's freak out when he and everything in the room starts laughing at his predicament.
The 2007 Beowulf film successfully climbed out of the Uncanny Valley on the human side. Their secret? Motion-capture every tiny movement of the human actor's faces — and emulate an Xbox 360 videogame.
Also used for effect in the draft examination sequence of Across the Universe. The strange, plastic, square-jawed and Ken-doll-haired beings that looked like the unholy offspring of the Burger King for the creepiness involved. That's Julie Taymore for you.
Inadvertent: In Schwarzenegger's movie The 6th Day, Arnie buys his daughter an animatronic... doll... thing. The movie gave the impression that the doll was very popular in the future, but it looks creepy. It comes to its demise when it's destroyed and slowly says "I have a boo-boo". This video was probably inspired by that doll.
Another inadvertent in a Schwarzenegger movie: Total Recall, with Johnny Cab. He's even creepier when he's melting.
Disney's Enchanted features, of all things, the dragon version of the Uncanny Valley, with a villainess whose face is just a little strangely... well, animated.
Darla Dimple from Cats Don't Dance looks normal (if disgustingly cute) as animated◊, but as a physical maquette◊, not so much.
The Spielberg movie A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) turned the Uncanny Valley on its head by having actual actors play the human-looking androids. However, it was used for effect in some scenes with CGI-animated partially damaged androids being hunted down and put on a bonfire and a sequence with many identical boy and girl androids hanging in the factory. The part where David "breaks" after ingesting human food (he shudders to a stop and the left side of his face sags alarmingly) was particularly effective. Alas, a scene after that, where David is lying down on a operating table, still looking human, but with the "skin" on his chest peeled away, especially with them "testing" him; they flick something in him and his hand rises up slowly in a dead manner.
The Dark Seekers of I Am Legend were impressively done in terms of integrating film footage with their movements, but whenever you got a clean look at them, they were just enough Conspicuous CG to throw off the belief.
The Hulk 2003 movie had special effects with a great level of detail for the title character, but oddly enough the most complaints came from an extended sequence where the Hulk wore purple pants that did not mesh well against the real environment and the green skin. The other problem with it was the unlayered look on the Hulk's skin. Human skin has levels of transparency (one of the reasons it's so hard to emulate) giving it diverse textures and colors. The Hulk did not have this, making him look like he was molded from clay. This was fixed in the 2008 Continuity Reboot where the Hulk's skin has a much more realistic sheen and depth.
The Emcee from Cabaret.
The humans in Dreamwork's upcoming movie Monsters vs. Aliens seem to skirt this line.
Intentionally applied to The passengers◊ on the Soul Train from Spirited Away.
Pixar has this for the human characters in its early films. The humans in the early movie Toy Story look rather odd, and a major reason for some strange settings was to feature characters who would look less odd as CG characters. The human cast of The Incredibles and Ratatouille are probably the most realistic, but they avoided the Valley by having cartoonish proportions. In Wall-E, they try to avoid it, but there are some people who found the live-action scenes deeply disturbing. The CG background and cheap props only make it worse, particularly in comparison to the CGI, such as Wall-E's treads.
WEEBO from the remake of Flubber. Expressive voice with proper tonal changes? Check. The habit of emulating humanlike tics such as tilting one's head and talking with one's hands (as it is possible)? Check. A camera lens for one eye and two small glowing light for the other, along with a complete inability to make any facial expression more detailed than a letterbox mouth? check. her human hologram form is almost as bad: aside from the slight transparency that comes with movie holograms, it's just a little out of focus and never blinks.
The puppets in Team America: World Police were capable of incredibly subtle and detailed movements (in their faces, of course). The producers decided they were too realistic, and thus too creepy, and decided to purposefully scale them back a bit.
Both Terminator and Terminator 2 enter the Uncanny Valley; the former when the Terminator performs surgery on its face in the mirror, and the latter when T-1000 is talking on the phone in a woman's voice.
In the James Bond film Die Another Day, during the opening song there are women composed entirely of fire and embers. They look downright disturbing.
Intentionally used in Mirror Mask, from The Jim Henson Company but with a screenplay by Neil Gaiman and directed by visual artist Dave Mc Kean. It featured a scene of intentionally Uncanny Valley-tacular robots singing "Close To You" while hypnotizing the protagonist. And then there are the Sphinxes. Don't let them see you're afraid.
This little number from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Deus Ex Machina. Nuff said.

Literature

Lampshaded in So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld. A special effects whiz explains that the human face is the hardest thing to animate convincingly because humans spend almost all of their time reading faces. If it's even a tiny bit off, we won't accept it.
The villainous Gray Agents of Sean Cullen's Hamish X series of novels are described as being deep down in the Valley.
Lewis took his readers again to the Uncanny Valley in writing Perelandra, the second volume of his Space Trilogy: describing as follows how the alien-evil-spirit-possessed Weston appeared to the novel's hero, Dr. Ransom:
[Weston's] body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man ... [although i]t was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely non-human. Ransom had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with — the man-aged corpse, the bogey, the Un-man.
Herbert von Krolock on The Sueniverse is described thusly:
"He was beautiful, [and]... human-shaped, yes, but something about his face in repose failed unnervingly at being entirely human. He was almost repulsive when emotionless." The fact that his face goes entirely still and then begins to twitch before he has his occasional psychotic episodes doesn't help.

Live Action TV

Red Dwarf: Holly is generally acceptable because he/she acts just like a normal human, with a lighthearted, "chummy" way of speaking. But on the instances where he/she malfunctions and reverts to Robo Speak it can be damned creepy. "The phrase 'cargo bay doors' does not appear to be in my lexicon." for example. An episode in which it is revealed that Lister is a robot lampshades this trope, with Kryten explaining that some robots were produced that were too close to humans in appearance, which was creepy for some and so they were recalled.
Every single one of those child actors from Disney Channel. Even The Onion had to comment on this.
Doctor Who: "The Robots of Death" references the Uncanny Valley effect in the form of "Grimwade's Syndrome", a mental disorder whose sufferers subconsciously equate highly humanoid robots with animated corpses; the robots in that particular story looked just slightly less human than the animatronic dummies on a Disneyland ride, but the idea of being surrounded by human-sized creatures with emotionless and immobile features is unpleasant enough that the audience could easily accept it.
- Autons. After they were first shown, some children would refuse to walk past a clothes shop.
  - The clockwork robots from "The Girl in the Fireplace". *shudder*
Parodied brilliantly on the live action show 30 Rock as the reason why it is impossible to do a porn video game:
Tracy: Tell it to me in Star Wars.
Frank: Alright. We like R2-D2 and C-3PO.
Tracy: They're nice.
Frank: And up here, we have a real person like Han Solo.
Tracy: He acts like he doesn't care, but he does!
Frank: But down here we have a CGI Storm Trooper or Tom Hanks in The Polar Express.
Tracy: I'm scared! Get me out of there!

: ... and then the game he made went on to make $300 million. He apparently figured out a way to avoid the valley after all.

The miniseries adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyles' The Lost World (the one starring Bob Hoskins) subtly uses this one to make the Australopithacines distinctly creepy.
LazyTown. Specifically some of the human characters and their prosthetics. Not to mention that Robbie Rotten looks just a little too close to Bruce Campbell.
Though not alive (or meant to be alive), Buster from Mythbusters fame falls squarely into this category, considering all of the things Adam and Jamie have done to him to get a more "human" response out of him during tests, including giving him a "spine", "brain", and even breakable "bones" for testing injury. Special mention goes out to the "death balls" used for the Plywood Builder myth, which shatter upon a lethal impact, releasing stage blood. All used for effect, of course.
The three creepiest characters on Buffy The Vampire Slayer are generally considered to be the Gnarl, The Gentlemen, and Sid. The first two by virtue of exaggerated and odd movement, and the last due to being a self-animating ventriloquist's dummy.
Max Headroom: The voice! The face! The eyes! The arrogance! (example)
- Creepier is the Max Headroom WTTW pirating incident.
The special 200th episode of Stargate SG 1 featured the SG-1 team as marionettes and as this link◊ shows, it certainly qualifies as Uncanny Valley.
A very good example is FRAN, the replicator created by Rodney Mckay in Stargate Atlantis. She acts perfectly human, friendly, yet is willing to completely obey orders (meaning suicide) and is even slightly enthusiastic about it. It is very much the Uncanny Valley. The notable thing is that she is actually unsettling to the other characters (Such as Mckay himself) because of this, too.
Mr. Data, the android in Star Trek: The Next Generation, sometimes slips a little ways down the right side of the Valley—though, as he's played by a person, he never gets very far down. The grimace-lockjaw-rictus-smile he had during the dancing scene in "Data's Day" greased the slope quite effectively.
- Switching him off also had this effect, though for the opposite reason (the character we were expected to believe was a machine looked disturbingly human when he was deactivated - and effectively, dead.)
"Pinnochio is broken. Its strings have been cut."
Similar to Data, Cameron of The Sarah Connor Chronicles sometimes slips into the Uncanny Vally, such as one scene where she perfectly repeats a deceased classmates' last words, word-for-word and inflection-for-inflection. In another, equally disturbing example, while she is being crushed between two trucks, her face is covered in cuts and burns, and her head is being sliced open, she starts talking to John in a completely normal tone of voice that shifts into frantic pleading and crying just like a normal person.
- The crowning moment of uncanniness comes in the episode "Allison from Palmdale," where Cameron acts exactly like a normal, ordinary teenage girl. Except that the viewer knows just what Cameron really is, and that makes Cameron all the more disturbing.

Music

Speaking of Max Headroom, some viewers apparently found the mid-1980s video for "Paranoimia" by The Art of Noise (with Max Headroom) sufficiently creepy to leave them in vague fear of it for decades.
The scary puppet in the video for Interpol's song "Evil" is a weird example. It's very, very puppety. It almost looks like a muppet, and it moves its hands like they're on strings. But there's no visible strings and the thing's got a very expressive face, enough that you still get this effect. That last shot where the lights flicker and they swap the puppet for a real boy doesn't make anything any less creepy, either.
RoboLou Reed in "No Money Down". Pulling off the flesh almost reduces the effect but introduces potential Nightmare Fuel.
Some of the puppets in Genesis' Land of confusion, especially Reagan emerging from the water in slow motion.
That... thing from Daft Punk's "Technologic".
The music video for Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" stars a bunch of adorable monkeys... with the band member's faces.
These puppets. Granted, that's the point—they're enacting "The Conqueror Worm", a poem by Poe, and are supposed to be mockeries of humans, but still...
The music video for Serj Tankian's "Empty Walls" features the lead singer parading around a Circus Of Fear with a bizarre, sociopathic look on his face, while various small children play happily... or, as some people have interpreted it, re-enact the War on Terror.
The video for Herbie Hancock's "Rockit", of all things, is improbably terrifying. Those half-human robot abominations (robominations) wandering around that creepy deserted house?
Intentionally used in the music video for "Black Hole Sun" by Sound Garden, which features an eerie "off" suburb populated by clearly insane grinning people. It's actually a relief when they all get sucked into the sky. One magazine actually called it the best horror movie of the year!
The puppets in the music video for Wyona's Big Brown Beaver by Primus.

Tabletop Games

The roleplaying game Promethean: the Created puts a different spin on the Uncanny Valley. The player characters are Artificial Humans, ranging from reanimated corpses to magically animated statues, who appear human through the thinnest of supernatural veneers. Muggles can tell the difference on some deep, fundamental level, meaning that spending too much time around them is enough cause to haul out the Torches And Pitchforks.
A similar effect happens to Vampires in Vampire: The Requiem. As they get older and lose touch with their Humanity, it gets harder for them to interact nicely with mortals. They forget to do things like blink, breathe, vary their vocal inflections or send off the other signals that humans unconsciously do without thinking. Vampires that have lost enough Humanity will appear like walking, talking corpses.

Toys

These Reborn Baby dolls from MacPherson crafts. The photos alone are fine, because they just look like photos of babies. Having such a doll around would be like having a real baby that never moves at all, which is just horrific.
- The toys aren't the horrifying part. What these women use them for are. Ax Crazy minus the ax, anyone? (Unless you're the unlucky sap who happens to fall onto one of these by accident. Judging by the article, the ax will soon follow.)
- Just the Fridge Logic of their name, "Reborn Baby", is enough to give you pause...
Baby Born◊ dolls are deep in the Valley, with their empty staring eyes and their faces forever frozen in an unnatural pout... brrr.
Resusci Annie. Don't even get us started on the baby versions of that doll. It helps that the mold for her face was based on L'Inconnue de la Seine, the death mask of an unidentified young woman who drowned in the Seine River around the late 1880s.
Baby Alive.
Furreal Friends manage to apply this to animals.
Almost any realistic doll based on a baby, really. This is likely because babies are such twitchy expressive energy pods that seeing one of these inactive homonculi triggers some deep instinct to save the life of a baby that suddenly ceased moving. Or maybe they just really are that creepy. (The fact they're often the first things demons possess in literature certainly doesn't help.)

Video Games

In Guitar Hero III, the graphics are notably improved from previous installments. Not all of the characters look different from previous versions, but the male singer in particular stands out. While he now mouths the words more realistically, his jaw is enormous. He nearly looks muppetesque. Especially strange given that he looks perfectly normal in the animated cinemas. Let's not forget the drummer, who acts like he's part of the animatronic band at a Chuck E. Cheese style restaurant.
The Grotesqueries from Drakengard, partly due to Anime Anatomy, although the Uncanny Valley is what the game's makers were going for.
Western-made "adult" PC games (read: Porn) tend to not sell very well, even on the direct download market. Publishers are baffled by this. This editor would point them all to their misguided attempts at "realism" and the intensely creepy female... things, that result. A particular example is Active Dolls (NSFW), where the mannequin-like Creepazons are designed to lock their eyes onto the camera at all times and angles when not engaged in... other activities. Given the "models'" unchanging expressions and dead eyes, one wonders how the programmers considered this anything other than the wrong end of Uncanny Valley?
Japanese-made porn games usually manage to avoid the valley by giving the girls anime eyes and faces and making the male character faces (if not his whole body) invisible or impossible to see directly. 3D 'love simulator' maker Illusion has gained large notoriety and a wide fanbase for their Biko, Sexy Beach and Artificial Girl series.
Final Fantasy X dips in and out of this trope, particularly with the character Tidus. Depending on the angle and lighting, he can either be real-looking enough to, well, look real, or look like his face is a mask. Partially due to the fact that the animators used the default in-game model, present in gameplay, in most scenes, but used a much higher quality version with a fully expressive face whenever a character was the centerpiece of a cutscene. Sounds great in practice, but their habits of forgetting to use the high-quality model, or even worse have a HQ-model and a gameplay model in the same cutscene at the same time made this quite jarring and unimmersive. There is a particularly jarring scene in Final Fantasy X-2 where Yuna and Rikku are trying to puzzle something out ("Key-Mon?" "Monkey!"), and there's a close up shot of Rikku's low-quality face as she says something. It is, by far, the most disturbing thing: passionate speech, dead face.
Fandom is divided on the Forsaken from World Of Warcraft; some consider the female Forsaken to be Cute Monster Girls, other consider both sexes to reside deep in the Uncanny Valley. Both sides are right, to at least some degree, owing to variations in personal tastes and the range of appearance options for Forsaken faces, from "cute green skinned girl" to "where's your jaw, and who stitched the leather X over your eyes?" Then again, they are zombies, just in varying states of decay.
Hilde on the Xbox 360 boxart of Soulcalibur IV. It's her eyes... her soulless eyes.
Princess Elise from Sonic The Hedgehog 2006: Princess of Uncanny Valley. Being alongside characters that are modeled after Felix the Cat punctuated it even further. The other humans in the game don't help it, with their random arm flailings in grotesque parody of actual body language. Sonic Team seems to have understood this, and made the humans in Sonic Unleashed look like they came straight out of Ratatouille.
Deliberately invoked in Metal Gear Solid 4, where a not-quite-human all-female unit was modelled by scanning in the physiques and faces of four real-life actresses, whose slightly too detailed faces jarred horribly against the more stylised look of the entirely digitally made 'human' characters. Even more deliberate when you consider that, according to their back-stories, those girls have all suffered from really heavy mind rape. Thus the impression that they're dead on the inside.
Pretty deliberately invoked with GLaDOS in Portal. Her vocoded, modulated voice seems quite endearing when she's just a Ninja Butterfly, but when she progresses to Big Bad the emotion seeping into her voice makes her seem very creepy. At one point, she informs the protagonist that 'some day, we'll look back on this and laugh and laugh and laugh...o-o-oh boy'. Each instance of the phrase 'and laugh' is said with exactly the same pitch and intonation. This is also true, albeit to a lesser extent, in the Turrets. Most of their lines are cute and even funny, but some, like "Are you still there?", "Hey! It's me!", and the cries and laughter all sound like what it really is—an eerie attempt at sentient speech from a non-sentient creature. They also suffer from misplaced or low-toned emotion in select places, confusing the player's perception of them. Of course, the fact that they're actively machine-gunning you as they charm you, spraying blood in bright red fans over the walls, also makes for an unsettling dichotomy.
The game Bioshock seems to make intentional use of this phenomenon - the grotesque, ex-human Splicers are even more unnerving for how human they still look. The first ghost you encounter subtly lampshades this: "I'm too spliced up! I'm too spliced up... Now nobody's gonna want me..."
When unmasked◊, Samus Aran certainly invoked this in the original Metroid Prime. In subsequent 3D appearances, she was toned down in this regard. Although in Prime 2: Echoes◊, it's hard to define if it's "more cartoonish" or "further down the valley".
Largely averted in Half Life 2, with realistic lip-synching and largely realistic character movements, but deliberately invoked in the G-Man, who acts as though he has read about human speech and mannerisms without really understanding them. Of course, it's implied that he isn't entirely human.
Probably why the Pirates Of The Caribbean level looks so out of place in Kingdom Hearts II
- This troper thinks that the Pirates characters look fine on the own. The problem is the contrast between them and the brightly colored, animesque Sora.
Sony's first-party PS 3 sports games (MLB the Show and NBA 0x) have technically excellent 1080p graphics. Except every arena looks to be made entirely of plastic, and every player looks like a wax doll.
Aversion: Team Fortress 2 is a visually attractive game, but the maps and characters are highly stylized with exaggerated, cartoonish features. Though the aversion isn't due to fear of the Valley per se.
Avoided in Heavenly Sword where the game designers had real life actors give real performances with motion capture sensors in order to have their real facial expressions tell the animated characters how to look. The result was lively animation that dodged the valley entirely and was praised for its stunning cutscenes.
Mass Effect largely avoids this, in-game - the facial models are of excellent quality and generally look very real. However, the facial customisation section during character creation can be disturbing - the facial image is animated, moving and breathing naturally even as you alter it, and the sight of it mutating as you alter the parameters is somewhat disturbing. It's also possible to end up with rather odd-looking results if you set multiple features to the extremes of the available scales.
"Adult" video game Strip Fighter 2 almost averted this by making all the detailed pictures of women be scans of actual pictures of women. Then someone got the bright idea to make the pictures wink. Without moving any other part of the face.
The final scene of the Terranigma intro can be thoroughly disturbing. See for yourself. (The scene in question starts at roughly 1:55.)
- Not to mention the part where you wake up from your "free" sleep to find a curious stench in the air, like rotting meat...turns out, everyone in town is a zombie. Even the kids.
The intro to Silent Hill 4: The Room was quite a bit more terrifying than the game proper. Never Trust A Trailer.
Earth Bound's endgame.
Then there's this little number◊.
If you fail at the Boss Rush in Sexy Parodius, you're treated to a rather frightening image of the final boss laughing at your misfortune.
Roughly half the cast (the energetic ones) of the Dynasty Warriors series avoid this trope (they instead sometimes border on being too cartoony, especially really big guffawing guys like Meng Huo), but the 'serene' or 'contemplative' characters like Da Qiao, Zhuge Liang, Xu Huang, and Yue Ying more than make up for them. Yue herself is a bit of a shift as the emotion in her lines show she was meant to have Action Girl expressions. She just comes off as very very strange when speaking, almost like a period automaton from an old German sci-fi movie. Compare with the Rikku example up above. Strangely, Lu Bu also falls into the second catagory depending on the game involved, as sometimes his voice is bizarrely low-pitched in comparison with his roaring angryface. Methinks Koei had different modelers working on different sets of people which resulted in the discrepancies between believable and non. Does not seem to happen as often in the Samurai Warriors universe.

Western Animation

Transformers: Beast Wars avoided this by having no human characters; Transformers are humanoid, but not designed to look specifically human. Those cavemen, and poor, poor Transmute, on the other hand...
Deliberately avoided in Mainframe Entertainment productions featuring human or at least somewhat human-like characters (ReBoot and Action Man). They would exaggerate proportions just slightly to give them a warm animated appearance instead of attempting photo-realistic.
The rotoscope-based animated version of The Lord Of The Rings by the usually brilliant Ralph Bakshi fell right down into the Uncanny Valley with a thud.
Skyland, a motion-captured 3D-modeled cartoon, attempts to make things look more stylish by cel-shading it afterward. This backfires, though, making the characters look inhumanly polished and sending the entire thing plummeting into the Uncanny Valley.
Math Girl: A series of semi-animated CGI shorts with writing that seems aimed at children, subject matter (calculus) aimed at high school and college students, and extremely frenetic, jerky pacing that makes actually learning anything unlikely. The characters are right in Uncanny Valley, helped by the creepy Exorcist-style theme music. The temptation to shut it off or vocally make fun of it is nearly unbearable, but unfortunately, this is rather hard to do in a classroom setting.
Star Wars The Clone Wars: I know it's deliberately designed to be cartoon-like, but the characters are sufficiently realistic in general that some of the detailing is just jarring enough that it makes my teeth itch. Especially the hair. Especially Obi-Wan's beard. Padme's pipe-stick arms deserve a mention too (I can't use the "well, she's not human" excuse I can use to ignore the same thing on Ahsoka). She makes Olive Oyl look big-boned.
Courage The Cowardly Dog was a very frightening cartoon for many, often skipping the "comedy" part of its "horror-comedy". By far, the most frightening episode was the series finale: "Perfect". Courage had a series of nightmares where he was declared "not perfect" by what appears to be a superdeformed CGI Fetus with a freaky adult's face◊.
- Don't forget the Kitty&Bunny episode. Kitty before removing the mask qualifies, and the atmosphere and music certainly doesn't help. Doc Gerbil's World is equally mindrending.
Intentionally invoked in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack with this image◊ of the titular Flapjack.
Also invoked for many of the villains in The Real Ghostbusters. One of the most traumatic characters for anybody growing up in the eighties might have been their Boogey Man.
If you're still not clear on what the Uncanny Valley looks like, watch "Sid the Science Kid".

Other

The animatronic Elvis bust falls squarely into this category.
The "little girl giant" mega-marionette that's made appearances at parades and festivals all over Europe has a limited head and facial animation that still manages to be creepily human in execution.
The tech demo for Heavy Rain. You know, The Casting? This vid?
Any type of CG face that is made to show what someone (usually a historical figure) might have looked like. Then again, Tutankhamen supposedly looks like Boy George.
Most Disney mascot costumes are either animal suits (Mickey, Donald, etc.), extremely cartoony humans (Lilo, Pinocchio), or just regular people in costumes (Aladdin, the princesses), avoiding the valley. Captain Hook, on the other hand, is just disturbing; he bears an unsettling resemblance to V. Or rather, V looks like him.
Postmortem photography, the Victorian custom of taking pictures of corpses posed as if they were alive. They sit in chairs, they hold each others' hands... but they're horribly, obviously dead. The modern versions of such photography are worse. Color photography plus the discoloration skin undergoes due to decomposition equals Very Very Wrong.
Nintendo, in an effort to promote their WiiSpeak microphone, has a demo set up in their Nintendo World store in New York City, where kids can gather around and talk to a virtual representation of Mario, Wario, and assumedly others as well (those were the only two this troper saw), who actually will respond back. Whoever is speaking as the Italians (maybe Charles Martinet, maybe just a really good impersonator) does a fine job providing the voices of these characters, but the characters themselves are like some horrible cross between old cartoony graphics and videogame graphics, resulting in Mario and Wario looking creepier than they ever have in history. This isn't helped by the fact that they can apparently play with their faces ala the interactive face in Super Mario 64. This troper screamed like a little girl when he saw Wario's eyes bug out...
This Picture◊
The 8,000 terracotta warriors in Mausouleum of the Chinese Emperor Qin.
Several artists on Deviant ART do digital pictures of cartoon characters, only gives them photorealistic details regarding the skin, hair, eyes, texture, etc, while KEEPING the cartoon proportions and the size and shape of the features. Anyone who's seen those pictures knows what I'm talking about.
Anything made with iClone. Anything. There, witness some of the absolute worst here. You'll never look at Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck in the same way again.

Real Life

Personal experiences are available in Troper Tales: Uncanny Valley
The Japanese tradition/hobby/fetish of kigurumi - cosplaying human and humanoid anime characters using masks and body stockings - seems to back into the Uncanny Valley from the human side, due to the mad creepy effect the results sometimes have. Doubly so in light of the fact that a significant percentage of cosplayers are males who nevertheless portray female characters. Look and be mentally scarred.
- You can see an in-fiction example in Megatokyo, with appropriate reaction from Largo.
- Cosplay where the subject actually does literally resemble the character id from the Valley, because of how heavily stylized the characters in comparison...well, an example. This◊ is Osaka. Say "howdy". This◊ is a girl cosplaying her. This is even creepier.
  - Creepier? I think you mean funnier.
Botox (or any plastic surgery disasters for that matter) tends to send a real flesh and blood person sliding into the Uncanny Valley. Examples: Dolly Parton, Joan Rivers.
- Collagen injections make some vict... er, patients have faces bloated like someone with a shellfish allergy at an all-you-can-eat shrimp bar.
Real life example: Stephen Harper◊, Prime Minister of Canada. Spoofed by Air Farce,a Canadian comedy show by having the actor who plays Harper act like a robot. A really diabolical robot.
- On the subject of politicians, Dmitry◊ Medvedev◊, President of Russia. The eyes, the staring eyes... Now, that gives the phrase "Medvedev is just Putin's puppet" a whole different meaning.
- Elba Esther Gordillo, the scariest thing in Mexican politics, by far. Just google around for pictures of her, you won't like it.
Eh... Michael Jackson. (Editor ducks and runs.)
Manbabies.com - 'Nuff said.
Real people doing robotic dancing or miming, especially if wearing make-up to look metallic or just shiny. A creepy example: This video for Radio Number One by Air. Made worse by the fact that the vocals are done using a vocoder.
- Like the three performance artists from the Blue Man Group.
In fact, the vocoder counts as an aural version of this trope. Even if you don't find "Believe" by Cher an awful song, there is something just plain weird and unnerving about her vocoder altered voice in the bridges. Especially as it is about the last original part of her left.
Non-human example: BigDog. It looks JUST enough like something...alive to be almost cute, but that buzzing, and that weird, jerky walk...*shudder*
The retouched photos on this site fall into Uncanny Valley from the human side.
Visible Body.com
- An inversion - though perhaps even more freaky - is the Body Worlds exhibits. The pieces look like plastic Biology class models... Until you realize that they're real human bodies, organ systems, and extremities "plastinated" with resin.
Robotic imitations of the human voice can also have this effect. For instance, there's this program which emulates a child learning to speak, developing from random babbling to complete sentences, but with enough mechanical-sounding stammering to keep it creepy. And this recording of a coded message sent through a secret radio station, complete with an Ironic Nursery Tune accompanying the Creepy Child speech.
Models made using Pixologic's Zbrush, although the artists must have incredible skill. Creepiest is when they model real people, and I think the Joker ones take the cake.
Isabelle Dinoire◊, the French woman who received a partial face graft following a massive disfiguring dog attack. One the one hand, the sheer awesomeness of medical science is laudable, but on the other... the press conference where she spoke with her entire face stiff as a mask sends chills down the spine.
Clowns. Parts of their facial expressions are fixed, painted on, and the parts of their expressions which move are deliberately exagerrated. Clown puppets are even worse.
- Mimes. Don't forget mimes.

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