Unintentional Uncanny Valley / Live-Action Films

This animatronic baby was almost used in the Twilight movie series. Fortunately for our dreams, wiser heads prevailed...

---

In General:

• The Uncanny Valley has been around since the early 20th century. Ladislas Starevich had made some very early stop-motion animated films, originally for educational purposes, but then he realized, "hey, I got a lot of potential stuff to do!" so he decided to make his puppets star in dark comedies. What were these puppets of? Actual embalmed insects. He originally intended to recreate a stag-beetle fight because he couldn't get them to do it under stage lights.
• 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 low speed, so that they move at normal speed on playback but look all twitchy and deranged.
  • See the remake of House on Haunted Hill (1999) for this in action.
  • This effect was used deliberately in 1999's Stir Of Echoes to emphasize the murdered girl's status as a ghost.
  • Which is also used to rather spooky effect in both The Ring and The Grudge.
  • This kind of twitchy movement in ghost-themed films is probably common enough to be considered a trope in itself; it can be traced back at least as far as Jacob's Ladder.
• In old movies where white people wear blackface, this trope will definitely be in play. The people who do it look more like monsters than actual Black people (unfortunately, that may have been the point...).

Movies:

• Also used for effect in the draft examination sequence of Across the Universe (2007). The strange, plastic, square-jawed, and Ken-doll-haired beings that look like the unholy offspring of the Burger King for the creepiness involved. That's Julie Taymor for you.
• The unnaturally toothy smile of one of the eponymous characters in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (guess which one) is surprisingly disturbing.
• Aladdin (2019) has Will Smith’s Genie who from the original trailer falls squarely into this trope. In an effort to replicate the large torso of the cartoon Genie, the remake Genie has a weirdly muscular torso which is at extreme odds with Will Smith’s face, which also doesn’t look right due to the shape of the Genie’s head. Fortunately, since Genie takes a normal human form for most of the movie the Uncanny Valley-ness isn’t as severe as it could’ve been.
• Alita: Battle Angel somewhat infamously chose to give the main character Big Anime Eyes in a live-action movie, which naturally got a lot of reactions of this nature. Especially odd because the actress, Rosa Salazar, already looks very much like the original character, making one wonder why they went through the trouble of having her do motion-capture.
• Amélie: While Amélie looks pretty normal, the cover/poster rendition of her is a bit unsettling◊. Those eyes...
• The thick-furred aliens in Attack the Block are an animalistic example: at a distance, they'd look pretty much like bears or apes, if not for their incredible Vantablack fur.
• The Na'vi in Avatar have an odd, shiny skin tone (although this is actually Reality Is Unrealistic and closer to real life than most films). The movement physics can be seen as differing from human, being more flowing, although this is to be expected considering the difference in size and strength and a completely different environment for movement. The actors specifically had to move in a different way to humans - it's likely that if they walked in a human manner, people would complain more.
  • The facial proportions are very different. It's relatively subtle at first, but the eyes are 2 to 2.5 times larger than normal and more widely spaced...because the nose is about twice as wide and flattened considerably. The mouth is normal-sized, which serves to emphasize the other changes. The ears are not just hollowed and pointed, they're a full inch and a half higher on the head.
    • The less Na'vi-like avatars (such as Grace's) do this with the human nose, making it look disproportionate compared to the Na'vi faces, which look disproportionate compared to humans.
  • Avatar is often invoked as the "exception to the rule" of the CGI Uncanny Valley effect alienating (or disturbing) viewers, to the tune of $2 billion-plus box office and single-handedly causing the rebirth of 3D. One thing that really helped here was a technological breakthrough: a small camera worn by the actors could capture and record the subtler facial movements — in particular, the movements human eyes make. The lack of such movements tends to hamper other mo-cap films; The Polar Express in particular gave some people the heebie-jeebies with the dead-eyed look of the characters.
  • Avatar: The Way of Water like its predecessor managed to avoid this for the most part with its staggering beautiful cgi and mo-cap being even more impressive than the first film thanks to more advanced technology. However at least one character: Kiri Grace’s daughter did land squarely within this trope. Not only does she have a more human looking face like her mother, but moreover she’s mo-capped and voiced by 74 year old Sigourney Weaver (who played her mom) despite Kiri being a adolescent. Though Sigourney does her best to sound young and Cameron even took references from films she starred in when she was younger, the Vocal Dissonance is still incredibly jarring and that coupled with her appearance gave rise to various complaints of this regarding her character from viewers.
• The body of the medium in Black Sabbath is clearly a dummy, but that only makes it look more terrifying.
• Renesmee, Bella's baby from Breaking Dawn Part I. She's like a moving Creepy Doll.
  RiffTrax: Jack-Jack from The Incredibles looked more realistic than this thing!
  • Even worse is an animatronic doll dubbed "Chuckesmee" (pictured) that was originally intended as a stand-in until the director decided that it would never work.
• For Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror, director Andrea Bianchi cast dwarf actor Peter Bark as the young child Michael, in order to circumvent Italian laws restricting the use of child actors in violent or sexual situations. Unfortunately, this had the effect of making the character fall head-first into the valley. It doesn't help that his English dub actor puts little to no effort into making him sound like an actual child.
• The same applies to The Cat in the Hat with Thing 1 and Thing 2. The Cat himself is no better; you can see the outline of Mike Myers' head through the makeup. And then there’s the Fish... it's a little unclear just WHAT they were trying to do with him, but it looks like they were trying to pull off a cross between the Fish from the book and an actual fish that you'd see in real life - and it results in a really, REALLY freaky-looking character design.
• The trailer for the 2019 movie adaptation of Cats became infamous immediately for its "digital fur technology" that it uses to make its live actors look like cat people with very human proportions. The fact that the actors actually move like cats doesn't help. Many comparisons to the below-mentioned Sonic design have been made. Then the actual movie came out, adding mice and roaches with human faces, plus Idris Elba as a cat with inexplicably Idris-Elba-coloured fur (which ends up on full display when he takes off his Badass Longcoat), to the mayhem.
  Jenelle Riley: Cats is pure Nightmare Fuel. The rejects from The Island Of Doctor Moreau putting on a show is bad enough, but add to that more crotch shots than a Michael Bay movie and every imaginable pun...and that still won't prepare you for the hellscape that is children's faces CGI'd onto mice.
• Similarly, the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the 2005 version at least); they are all inhumanly small and all played by Deep Roy. Perhaps averted with the same characters in the 1971 film, since orange skin and green eyelashes are far enough away from human to not fall into this category. For some people, though, this works in the other direction - the orange skin and green hair can make them look REALLY creepy, while the newer ones are human enough that, if you were to pass one in the street, you'd just think he was a strangely dressed little person.
• Chicago comes at this from the other side. To show how Billy Flynn uses Roxie to manipulate the press, "Press Conference Rag" features Renée Zellweger acting as a ventriloquist's dummy and a chorus of reporters made up to look like marionettes. The effect is quite chilling.
• In Cinderella (2015), the mice turning into horses can look comically weird, or really freaky. The end result is fine, but midway through the transformation there are some odd bits, such as horses with really big ears. The lizardmen, however, still look creepy.
• Clifford the Big Red Dog made the jump to live-action in his own live-action film, and he frankly looks really uncanny. Clifford's size and color are perfectly acceptable in the stylistic and animated setting of the books and cartoons, but he looks incredibly jarring and unsettling in a realistic live action setting.
• Clifford features comedian Martin Short playing the eponymous 10-year-old boy, and the producers didn't actually try to make Short look like a kid. They dressed him up in a suit and tie with shorts, and kept his adult face and voice. The end result puts Clifford well into the uncanny valley and caused the movie to tank.
• The heavy amount of makeup used to change actors' race, age, and gender in Cloud Atlas outright fails more often than it works.
• In The Dark Crystal, the two Gelflings are the most human-looking characters and the least convincing.
• The film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code features Jean-Pierre Marielle as Jacques Sauniere, but for most of the time the character is onscreen he is a corpse splayed out on the floor of the Louvre, and it is a really realistic model of the actor. While the effect is terrific, Jean-Pierre Marielle himself and his wife were severely creeped out by the sight of "his" dead body, as he revealed in an interview that can be seen on the Special Edition DVD.
• In Daft Punk's Electroma, the main character robots have latex poured over their helmets in order to look more human. They end up just looking terrifying, with their still faces and staring eyes. This is invoked because the other robots in the town they're in are also horrified and drive them out.
• Disney's Enchanted features the dragon version of the Uncanny Valley, with Narissa's dragon face being just a little strangely... well, animated.
• Everything Must Go has a bizarre Special Effect Failure in the background of a scene: Nick and Delilah are conversing in front of her picture window as her children play outside- the children go from moving and playing normally to suddenly becoming unnaturally frozen for a full six seconds, with the adults seeming not to even notice. Most likely the best take of the scene was one the kids weren't present for, so they had to be composited in for continuity... But it's unsettling once you notice, and apparently this even led to Pop-Culture Urban Legends, such as a theory that the child actors were mind-controlled and something accidentally triggered them to freeze in place.
• Fantastic Four:
  • The effects used to make Mr. Fantastic (as played by Ioan Gruffudd) stretch in both films are almost cartoonish but can appear quite unsettling, even though they are sometimes played for laughs. It's just nowhere as effective as in the comics.
    Johnny Storm: [when Reed stretches his arm under a door] That's gross.
  • It's also hard to sometimes accept the Thing as an actual human being, and the uncanny valley creeps in when everyone treats him as a horribly mutated Ben Grimm when it feels more like Michael Chiklis trapped in an uncomfortable costume. A more creepy example of Uncanny Valley in the films would be Doctor Doom in the early stages of his transformation, particularly the scar that has been "stitched" with metal staples, showing metallic tissue underneath.
• The Flash (2023) has gotten absolutely slammed for this, as whenever Flash goes so fast Time Stands Still the CG effects on the characters look so, so wrong. The highlights include the freaky babies Barry rescues from the hospital and the scenes where Barry turns back time and sees people and events from the previous films and previous scenes. But above all, the most ghoulish part comes in the climax where the universes collide and we see CG reconstructions of Christopher Reeves’s Superman and George Reeves’s Superman as well as Helen Slater’s Supergirl and Nicholas Cage’s Superman. Putting aside just how amateurishly freaky they look for the movie of this budget, the highly questionable ethics of resurrecting deceased actors in such a fashion has been criticised like with Peter Cushin in Rogue One if not more so (particularly given George Reeves killed himself over what Superman did to his career and left him impoverished — making the decision to bring him back in CGI pretty tasteless). Not to mention the fact Nicholas Cage and Helen Slater are still alive making the need to recreate them in CG unnecessary as simply de-aging them would’ve been comparatively much easier and less creepy. Not helping matters is the director Andy Muschietti claiming that the CG was supposed to be uncanny, something that was jossed by VFX artists who were overworked on the film and very apologetic at the results.
  • A more subtle example but one that is deeply unnerving once you notice it, is whenever there’s two Barry Allens on screen at the same time you can see that one is a stand-in with Ezra Miller’s face superimposed onto him. It works for the most part but some scenes and shots are just plain creepy because of it.
• The battle room drones in Flash Gordon. Tear the glasses off, and they have no eyes, just wires sticking out of empty holes!
• The Garbage Pail Kids Movie had incredibly creepy rubber masks worn by midgets that were supposed to be the titular characters. As their mouths weren't even capable of closing all the way, let alone moving naturally, the effect is far more unsettling than any of the grotesque imagery the trading cards that the movie was based on could produce.
• Harry Potter:
  • Voldemort's face in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on the back of Quirrell's head looks off-putting◊ for the wrong reasons, being very rubbery and quite inaccurate to the description in the book save for the color of the eyes.
  • Cat Hermione from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, while it was a funny moment in the book, the effects work in the movie makes it extremely unsettling◊. The only saving grace is that it's not on screen for long.
  • Grawp, Hagrid's giant brother from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is quite literally a big part of the book and later ones, but his depiction in the film is more than a little unsettling. It's probably due to him looking much closer to a human than say the troll from the first movie, not helped by the fact he's completely silent not even grunting or roaring like in the book meaning he can easily invoke this in viewers. Word of God confirmed this was partly the reason Gwarp made no return appearance for later films as well as budget reasons.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: During the scene where they're using polyjuice potion to create duplicate Harrys, some of the intermediate states are quite disturbing. Fortunately, they're not on screen for long.
• Hellboy:
  • Young Hellboy from Hellboy (2004), his vacant eyes, and that overbite...
  • In Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the baby that Hellboy rescues has a CG-rendered face that falls deep into the Uncanny Valley. Justified in that there was no way for a real baby to be used in a scene with stunts like that!
• By many accounts, Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit has this problem stretched across a production rather than just characters or special effects. It was shot in 48 frames per second rather than the 24 FPS that serves as the standard for filmmaking, producing a smoother-looking, more realistic picture with much less motion blur. Unfortunately, this means that "fake" things that might not have shown up with a slower shutter rate become extremely visible now that the camera is sharp and fast enough to catch them. The result has been described as looking like a soap opera, a sitcom, or a BBC production, with lighting, makeup, and sets that clearly look fake. Notably, this problem does not show up with 24 FPS versions of the film.
  • Dain Ironfoot, played by Billy Connolly, was completely CG'd over as a result of the makeup and helmet combo not being entirely satisfactory to Peter Jackson. The results are incredibly off-putting.
• E.B. in the film Hop. His fur and facial features is realistic enough to pass for that of a real rabbit. Yet the proportion of his head and body size just doesn't look right, and healthy rabbits aren't supposed to be that skinny. It just doesn't add up.
• In the live-action film of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the Whos look like normal humans but with large ears and weirdly shaped noses... and it's rather unsettling (although more on the adults than the children, who for obvious reasons go through less make-up). The Grinch himself isn't all that pleasant-looking either, though in his case it was probably intentional.
• The 2003 Hulk had special effects with a great level of detail for the title character, but had a problem with the unlayered look on the Hulk's skin. Human skin has levels of translucency (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, though it still had its problems, like the skin sometimes being too shiny, or the Hulk no longer being a Top-Heavy Guy.
• 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 CG to throw off the belief.
• The light-hearted musical film I Love Melvin, starring Debbie Reynolds (1953) has a dream sequence where Debbie is seen dancing with no fewer than six clones of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Three of them wear Astaire masks, the other three have Kelly masks. The masks seem unnaturally stiff and off-putting and comes off as extremely uncanny, considering the tone of the movie. It is actually hard to look on those faces spot on. You could actually imagine that Debbie's character would wake up screaming in the dark, facing an eerie grin from a false Fred Astaire...
• Spike Jonze's short film I'm Here is a very sweet and heartwarming film. However, the robots look a little...off. This is because they have very human-like facial expressions despite their artificial appearance, especially since the male robots have what look like computer cabinets for heads.
• In Jack Frost (1998) (no, not the film about the killer snowman), Michael Keaton is reincarnated as this horrifying thing◊. The way it looked and moved was scary to many viewers; Roger Ebert called it "the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects."
• Justice League (2017):
  • Infamous example is Superman's weird◊ ass◊ lips◊. Poor Henry Cavil was contractually obligated to keep his mustache for Mission: Impossible – Fallout to the woe of Warner Bros. who wanted a clean shaven Superman. So instead of just keeping the facial hair like most superheroes nowadays (although it would require an explanation as to how Supes' facial hair grew while he was dead) they just used CG to take away the stache, the result is very upsetting to the eyes.
  • Steppenwolf is a pretty bad case of this too thanks to Adaptational Ugliness making him look like a bad CG combination of man, goat, and tinfoil. The director's cut does not fix this enough, as the effects are better executed, but get unnerving when Steppenwolf removes his helmet. There’s also an earlier scene in the Director’s cut where Steppenwolf while genuine pleading to Darkseid has soft sad, pretty adorable eyes◊ which uncannily jars with the rest of his inhuman features, although it can be a moment of Narm Charm for certain viewers.
  • Due to the extensive reshoots, a lot of the visuals in the movie are jarring and of lesser quality which invokes this reaction.
  • Granny Goodness who is briefly seen in Zack Snyder's Justice League has this effect. While she is a New God alien in the comics, she’s a distinctly human looking one. The filmmakers however decided to render Granny in CG alongside Darkseid and DeSaad (likely due to the superimposing of a real actress into the shot being too difficult and costly) with the end result of Granny looking far creepier than her master Darkseid the God of Evil himself.
• Lady and the Tramp: The CG on the animal characters has had this feel to some viewers. In particular, the Tramp's appearance in the first trailer (in a shot reminiscent of The Shining, no less) really left an impression.
• In Let the Right One In the eyes of the vampire character reflect in the dark for just a second. Then the light comes on, and for half of another second, you see cat-like slit pupils before they return to normal.

• The Lone Ranger: Old Tonto. Dear God, old Tonto. The make-up is very well done, but boy does it not look natural.◊
• The Mystery Man at Andy's party in David Lynch's Lost Highway. It takes you a while to work out what's so off about his face, gradually you realise that (well, among other things) it's his fairly subtle eyeshadow and lipstick in combination with the fact that he never blinks. He also has no eyebrows, which has the handy effect of making a face look slightly odd, usually without people knowing quite why unless they are looking for it.
  • Also, his eyes have no irises, just huge pupils.
• In The Love Guru, there is a scene with a young Guru Pitka, which is just Mike Myers's head CGI-ed onto some kid's body. In addition to being conspicuous, it made his head look enormous.
• Malignant has a very deliberate case with its villain, who for being a human body operating backwards, has janky and erratic limb movements. And done without tricks by hiring a contortionist to play it.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Hulk:
    • The aforementioned design was enhanced and redesigned in The Avengers, where one of the newest improvements was making him more resemble his actor Mark Ruffalo. This article talks about many of the challenges that went into designing him, such as scanning Ruffalo's skin and making sure it wasn't so green that it looked unnatural. "Green is really hard," indeed.
    • Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok is much better but also just as strange since Hulk talks and acts like a normal person... relatively. Hulk's face resembles Mark Ruffalo even more and it's very odd (but funny) seeing Hulk sit down next to Thor and just talk instead of Unstoppable Rage. Hulk is even naked at one point, and director Taika Waititi joked about the prospect of CGI-ing Hulk's penis.
    • The Hulk seen in Avengers: Endgame takes this to the logical extreme as being the perfect hybrid of both Bruce Banner and Hulk (aka Professor Hulk), it’s like there’s a big green Mark Ruffalo walking around being careful and scientific instead of child-like rage-outs the result is strange◊ to say the least. It's also probably thanks to the preceding 10 years where you as an viewer have gotten used to the savage Manchild Hulk, that the sight of a near-human intelligent Hulk talking with no Hulk Speak is freaky.
  • In Captain America: The First Avenger, the pre-serumed Steve Rogers is distinctly... off. Given that the CGI's done by the same people that did The Curious Case of Benjamin Button◊, it's not much of a surprise. This becomes more visible watching on a home TV screen/laptop, as Chris Evans' face is naturally too big for the stand-in's head.
    • Averted, though, in the actual film, where the CGI effects used to shrink Chris Evans for all scenes that take place prior to Rogers getting the serum are so convincing that some critics, like Roger Ebert, couldn't tell whether pre-serum or post-serum Rogers was CGI.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron: Vision, as the combination of his shiny red translucent makeup and cosutume and his weird eyes irises can cause this reaction. Ironically Vision is actually more uncanny in normal clothing. (the exception might be WandaVision, where Vision dressed as a regular man starts off as Played for Laughs and then a part of the unnatural Stepford Suburbia setting, so it fits well with both)
  • The smoothing effect used to make older actors look younger has this effect to some people, but not because it's bad. In reality, it's too good: it's almost like time-traveling. Michael Douglas as Hank Pym in Ant-Man is especially good, as is Kurt Russell as Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which is also used to creepy effect later on with his flesh regrowing. Robert Downey Jr. also gets a CGI younger makeover in Captain America: Civil War; it actually took some people a few seconds to realize who it was.
  • The CGI Rhinos from Black Panther (2018) have caused this reaction, especially the bit where one Rhino licks Okoye’s face. T’challa and Killmonger’s suit-clad CGI bodies look particularly weird◊ during the Final Battle as well especially when unmasked too.
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: M.O.D.O.K aka Darren Cross◊ naturally had this effect on people with Corey Stoll’s head getting widened to the comic book version’s massive proportions and having the signature tiny limbs. All of which freaked many viewers out though in fairness this was an unavoidable circumstance of bringing M.O.D.O.K to screen with his sheer freakishness being a core part of his character. In-Universe the heroes have this exact reaction to him. There’s also the fact he’s bald unlike the comic version, which likely contributed to his uncanniness, though you could also argue giving him realistic hair would have just creeped people out even further.
• Moonwalker has a brief moment where, right at the end, Michael Jackson turns into a robot, then a spaceship, to fight the bad guys (somehow). If you look closely (or are unlucky enough to pause it on the shot) you can tell Michael's been swapped out for the model and it's really frigging creepy, like the Other Mother swooped in and replaced him with a doll.
• The Mummy Returns is a Trope Codifier for the Uncanny Valley with Dwayne Johnson's infamous◊ Scorpion King◊, somehow his actual scorpion lower body is less scary than his dead-eyed, plastic skinned torso and head. The context also makes it worse as the The Hero Rick and Big Bad Imhotep (played by real actors) are having a Duel to the Death then this abomination comes in and poorly jibes with the actual actors, especially when the previous movie pulled off the effects' work well enough.
• The poster for the movie◊ Orphan looks... wrong. Just vaguely creepy in the facial area, and you can't really tell how or why it's wrong. It's actually because the face is TOO symmetrical because it's actually half the face mirrored to make a whole face. Human faces aren't perfectly symmetrical, so a perfectly symmetrical face goes into Uncanny Valley.
• Paddington (2014): Paddington looks way too much like a real bear. Yet, some fans have been pleased to note that the facial expressions seen in the trailer look like they've been lifted directly from Peggy Fortnum's illustrations in the first book.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu: While this isn't the first time Pokémon have been rendered in CGI, this is the first time they've been rendered in photorealistic CGI. As such, a number of them can come off as creepy looking.
  • Pikachu himself is mostly well-designed, striking the appropriate balance between realism and faithfulness to the source material, but the one thing that looks off are his feet, which stick out of the bottom of his body like bird legs and look unnaturally thin and small compared to the rest of him.
    • His ears also look a bit unnatural; they're just furry appendages with no visible orifice. Then again, a Pikachu with exposed flesh in his ears probably would've looked worse.
    • Additionally, those who are used to his typical beady eyes with a simplistic light reflection might be unnerved by the fact that his eyes are rendered with visible sclera (the "whites" of the eyes) here.
  • Mewtwo. The creepiest thing about it is just how unrealistically smooth it is, lacking any sort of hair or wrinkled texture and looking almost like polished rubber. It gets worse when Howard's mind fuses with his and he starts talking with his mouth.
  • Charizard has always been a rather friendly-looking bright orange lizard, but while most of the Pokémon designs look nearly identical to the games, Charizard's cuteness has been drastically reduced, with a more mottled, burnt-orange skin color, a wrinklier head and face, and solid colored eyes that make it look less than pleasant (although, to be fair, in the scene where the effects of R on the Charizard wear off and it sees a Gyarados preparing to attack, the cartoonish "Oh, Crap!" expression it makes is rather cute).
  • Mr. Mime is probably hit the worst, especially since many feel he already suffered from this in traditional animation. However, others feel that being so unsettling is exactly the point; it's always been creepy. Rob Letterman, the film's director, confirmed this, saying that The Pokémon Company didn't even want them to use the character at first in order to avoid this, and even after getting permission, it was hard to make it not look too disturbing.
  • It's no better when we get a glimpse of an uncomfortably realistic Lickitung with its giant tongue rendered in all its slick, wet, flapping glory.
  • Somebody decided Jigglypuff's whole body should be covered in wispy hair. The result looks somewhat off. Of course, the alternative would have made the tuft of hair it has on the forehead look like some sort of deformity, which very likely would have looked worse.
  • Greninja's tongue scarf looks off due to a questionable design choice: It has prominent taste buds, like a human tongue and it drools more than we ever seen it drool in outside works. Although real frog tongues also have taste buds, they are much smoother in texture. Although this can be written off by the fact that the only Greninja we see in the film are experiments.
  • The frenzied Aipom◊ really takes the cake with its human-ish flesh and teeth clashing severely with its conspicuous lack of a nose. (Relatedly, this movie confirms that all Pokémon drawn without noses don't have one.)
  • Gengar is shown to be a giant, realistic ghost head with huge, piercing dark red eyes. Perhaps creepiest of all, its huge grin is revealed to be a set of giant upper front teeth with visible gums.
  • Gyarados looks especially fishy in live-action. It turns out what's basically a giant snook is much weirder to look at than a sea serpent.
  • Machamp falls into this for a different reason - it's still stylized, yet its lack of shadow and its strange skin tone◊ make it look more like it was just clumsily slapped in and taken from a PlayStation era FMV.
  • The same image also demonstrates another recurring design choice that results in the Pokémon looking "off", with Snorlax. The bright colourscheme of most Pokémon was faded out. Combined with their internal structure (or lack thereof), they resemble stuffed animals that have been bleached by the sun.
  • Ludicolo's texture looks more like Paper Mache, with surprisingly realistic looking eyes that just look dead.
• Prometheus:
  • Guy Pearce's portrayal of Weyland also fits here, as the old age makeup makes him look not quite right.
  • Charlize Theron's character, Vickers, plays in Uncanny Valley for most of the film. Her ludicrously perfect skin, generally emotionless face, and perfect hair make you question if she's another Weyland product. She's not.
• The sci-fi comedy S1m0ne contains a bizarre example — depending on whether one believed the hype that surrounded the film. When the movie first came out, the filmmakers initially maintained the fiction that the character of S1m0ne, a virtual actress created by Al Pacino's character in the movie, was, in fact, a CG construct, and went so far as to credit the character as being played by S1m0ne. In reality, just as with Max Headroom, a flesh-and-blood actor, Rachel Roberts, played the character, and unlike Max, there really wasn't anything in the film to make S1m0ne look at all like a CG construct (which was a plot point). Nonetheless, the Uncanny Valley effect still occurred in placebo form, striking people who went into the film thinking that S1m0ne was, in fact, an actual special effect. It might explain why the film flopped and faded into obscurity almost instantly.
  • S1m0ne makes for a great case study in the Uncanny Valley. It showed that merely knowing (or in this case, even mistakenly thinking) that what you are looking at is a CG construct can fundamentally alter how you look at it. This explains why Pixar and DreamWorks Animation still use such "cartoony" styles in their films even with the technology they have — they know they're fighting an uphill battle against the Valley, so they avoid it entirely.
• Something about the faces of Santa Claus and Merlin in the infamous Santa Claus (1959) (as seen on MST3K) isn't quite right. Yet the animatronic Santa in the toy shop window of that movie was both less realistic and clearly much creepier. And then there were the reindeer. Oh, the reindeer...

• The Smurfs in their 3d movie are particularly creepy. It makes you sympathetic with Gargamel, kill them all!
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) was initially infamous for its ghastly initial rendition of the title character. Many other live action adaptations of cartoon characters keep them looking cartoonish for fear of dipping into the Valley. The original design didn't◊. It was a CG version of the Blue Blur with a realistically proportioned head, two small individual eyes as opposed to his normal Conjoined Eyes, elongated limbs as opposed to the short rubber hoses seen in the video games, teeny-tiny hands and feet, and (worst of all) a realistic mouth full of individual human teeth, which among everything else, bears an almost perfect resemblance to that of a Promachoteuthis sulcus. No wonder Tom freaks out when he first meets him in the original trailer. It's a wonder anyone in the original cut of the movie could look at that Sonic for more than five seconds without getting the uncontrollable urge to burn him.
  • The backlash to this initial design was so bad, the film was delayed four months to fix it. The movie's second trailer showed off what ended up being Sonic's final design, and it looks far better than the first version, seen here compared side-by-side with the original design◊. The second version of Sonic looks much more in line with his game counterpart while still maintaining a few Pragmatic Adaptation choices. Response to the second trailer was overwhelmingly positive, leading a small subset of fans to wonder if Paramount Pictures intentionally made Sonic's first design bad to draw more attention to his second design (though this has been Jossed by members of the cast and crew of the film).
  • Surprisingly, the original design (rechristened as "Ugly Sonic") makes a cameo in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022), which plays his infamous reputation and uncanniness for laughs.
• The title character of Son of the Mask is a baby with extraordinary cartoon-like powers. Every time he uses them, you can spot the exact moment he stops being a real baby onscreen and becomes his CGI replacement, and the effect is creepy. Especially when he whispers "I must be losing my mind" over and over again into his dad's ear. Ugh.
  • Thankfully averted slightly with Otis the dog, who is much more cartoon-based in appearance and comes off as ugly cute. It helps that he's the woobie, too.
  • An early scene had the soon-to-be-father main character suffering a nightmare involving his wife giving birth to dozens of babies. They've all got long, thin vampire fangs that make them look absolutely terrifying. In this case, of course, it was deliberate.
  • The main character when wearing the mask. The face◊ is mostly just really green, but the absolute creepiness from it likely comes from the exaggerated, emphasized chin, the strangely lipsticked mouth, or the obvious plastic-hair.
• The big-eyed doctor in Star Trek (2009) can be quite unsettling.
  • "Why did I hire Dr. Satan for my OB/GYN?"
• Star Wars:
  • You know the clone pilots in the prequels? Take a closer look at their faces. Yep, Lucas just can't get enough CGI.
  • Rogue One has a digital recreation of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, done by superimposing his computer-generated likeness on a live actor's face, similar to a Deepfake though using direct Motion Capture. This was a major talking point among critics who not only had a mixed reaction to the effect itself, but questioned whether it was even ethical to "resurrect" an actor like this in the first place (although the filmmakers did obtain permission from the Cushing estate). For some viewers the combination of natural body movements and not-quite-right facial movements were deep in Uncanny Valley. But considering the character is Wilhuff Tarkin, who can commit genocide with the most polite tone of voice, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, the last-scene cameo of de-aged Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia is done the same way, and she isn't anywhere near as evil... until she smiles and her top lip moves in a very unnatural way.
• Tales from the Riverbank is a film about the characters from the children's show Hammy Hamster. The Tv show used real animals. The film used animatronic critters and it is horrifying.
• The puppets in Team America: World Police were capable of incredibly subtle and detailed movements (in their faces). The producers decided they were too realistic, and thus too creepy, and decided to purposely scale them back a bit. Most notably when they make fun of the fact that the puppets can't really walk. They also used a program to precisely match the puppets' mouth movements to the dialogue, but the effect was too terrifyingly realistic, so they toned it down to make the puppets seem more puppet-like.
• The turtles' faces in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), have invoked a surprisingly more human appearance than one might expect, leading for some to have had this reaction to them. Not unexpectedly, images of the tie-in toys don't seem to get this reaction.
  • This is also somewhat toned down in the sequel where the Turtles were redesigned slightly to try an alleviate this effect. It's still in play, but not quite as bad as the first film.
• Used deliberately with the infected dog from The Thing (1982). When it's introduced to the pen with the other dogs, it lies down and just stares straight ahead without moving an inch. Normal dogs don't do that. Even before that, it was often seen just staring at people for little reason, wandering around the compound seemingly aimlessly and never making a sound.
• A lot in Tideland, from Jeliza Rose's borderline sociopathic behavior, to some of the effects, like when Jeliza's face appears on one of her doll-heads, which actually makes Oancitizen jump.
• A scene featuring Peter Cushing in the Zucker Abrahams Zucker comedy film Top Secret! was filmed in reverse then played normally, giving the whole scene a slightly "off" feel. It's not until a couple gags of Val Kilmer "throwing" books back on the shelf and Cushing sucking dust back on to a book that it's clear exactly why. What 'helps up the creepiness of the scene even further is that the dialog by Kilmer and Lucy Gutteridge plays normally, while the track with Cushing's dialog is played in reverse.
• Another inadvertent in a Schwarzenegger movie: Total Recall (1990), with the JohnnyCab robot driver, who is like a robotic version of Robert Picardo (who also provides the voice). He's even creepier when he's melting.
  • And let's not forget Quaid's "old lady" disguise, where he can only say "TWO WEEKS!"
• The baby on the ceiling in Trainspotting during Ewan McGregor's withdrawal scene.
• Jeff Bridges' CGIed face in TRON: Legacy fell into this category for a lot of viewers.
  • The biggest problem with this is at the beginning of the movie, we see a flashback of Flynn while he was young which used CLU's CG facial model and it's exactly the same. The problem is in the eyes and eyebrows. Clu (and flashback Flynn) have a solid immovable brow and their eyes almost never widen the way Jeff Bridges' eyes do and did in the original film. The lack of emoting is the biggest problem with the CG model. That's fine for CLU, but makes no sense for the younger version of Flynn!
  • A younger Bruce Boxleitner as Tron in a flashback is also off-putting, not helped by that scene featuring two de-aged versions of Jeff Bridges.
  • Invoked with the programs, who are all just slightly off, from the way they move and emote to the fact that their pupils are shaped like hexagons instead of being round. Even Quorra had her moments. The sirens take this up to eleven with monotone, digitized voices, and robotic movements that put CLU to shame at points.
• The producers of the biopic Vysotsky: Thank You for Being Alive went to great lengths to make the actor portraying Vladimir Vysotsky, Sergey Bezrukov, look as much like Vysotsky as possible through a combination of heavy makeup, the assistance of CG, and dubbing his voice with that of Vysotsky's son, Nikita, all so that audiences could get to pretend like Vysotsky had come back to life for this movie. Going by the mixed critical response, it didn't really work. The effect is decent enough in some still shots and certain angles/lighting, but otherwise it becomes clear that Bezrukov couldn't emote a whole lot underneath all that makeup, his face looks weirdly smooth, and the emotion of the dubbed voice doesn't always match the facial expressions, or lack thereof. It doesn't help a great deal of the movie is very brightly lit and saturated, meaning the effect can't really be hidden.
• Shawn and Marlon's "disguises◊" in White Chicks. Holy jumping shitballs, you gotta wonder how anybody would fall for them...
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine features a cameo of Professor Xavier, which uses CGI to de-age him. The problem is, it was less-than-spectacular CGI and it just succeeds in making him look really creepy. He looks like Humpty Dumpty. The same effect was used in X3 to de-age both Xavier and Magneto but was much better-looking and a lot more convincing.

---