Unintentional Uncanny Valley / Western Animation

D'oh! No wonder everyone in Springfield look so alien-ish while facing front.

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• Pretty much any style of animation that's more focused on the characters being in the Three Quarter view. As such when a character of a distinct artstyle ends up facing the front or viewer, it becomes unsettling. The Simpsons and Phineas and Ferb are among the most notable examples where they achieved meme status.
• The Fleischer cartoons that pioneered rotoscoping can fall into this at times. Just look at Bamboo Isle, in which Betty Boop's massive, misshapen cranium is put on an actual hula-dancer's body. There it was probably unintentional, but everything about Minnie the Moocher seems precisely calculated to terrify, from the use of rotoscoping to make a walrus-man ghost dance like Cab Calloway to the dark lyrics of the song he sings to, well, everything else in the cartoon. Take a look here.
• Transformers:
  • Although it's not obvious to the viewer due to the animation style, this is implied to be why Transformers: Animated's Sari is despised by other children.
  • In Beast Wars, the damaged, half-formed Transmutate has a very human-ish face that, when combined with her creepy voice and the show's graphical limitations, cause many to find her to be unsettling.◊
  • One of the many complaints leveled against Beast Machines are the designs of the Maximals, all of whom have very humanlike features despite being alien robots. Nightscream is the worst offender: unsightly, scrawny body, a hunchback, Creepy Long Fingers, an incredibly humanlike face with gigantic, widely-spaced eyes, nostril-like holes on his forehead, and a clump of actual hair dangling in front of his face, which looks like a piece of flesh due to the CGI's limitations. Blackarachnia is a close second: her extra eyes deliberately invoked this, but when closed, they give her a giant, Klingon-esque forehead and her hair looks like a clump of tissue.
• Some people think the character designs in Sofia the First are ugly. They especially find Disney Princesses in CGI to be this.
• 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.
  • In a similar vein, Iron Man: Armored Adventures.
• Letter TV, a low-budget CGI educational program for children, seems to have fallen squarely into the valley's nadir.
• 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. Here's episode 1.
• Sid the Science Kid is very creepy. Downright hideous, in fact. Henson Studios used a technique that combines CGI Motion-Capture with actual puppetry. The actors are "filmed" in real time as the CGI characters, with as little post-production as possible being used.
• Dirt Girl World has live-action human eyes and mouths pasted onto cartoony bodies, which looks really freaky and creepy as a result. Why couldn't everything have just been fully animated?
• The Simpsons:
  • A throwaway gag in the season 5 episode "Rosebud" has George H. W. Bush rejected from Mr. Burns' birthday celebration for only serving one term as president. His caricature is mildly offputting, especially when he says "Get away from me, loser" to Jimmy Carter.
  • Many of the celebrity guest appearances come across as this, basically looking like traced photos with minimal to no effort to make them fit in with the Simpsons art style. The result is often incredibly unsettling.
• In the 1960s there were action animated shows (often based on Marvel Comics) that actually were not animated at all. Yes, apparently they reached a new low in how to be cheap on animation. But how did they handle the characters talking? Simple! When a character spoke, that character would be a still drawing with a human mouth on the face speaking. This is called Synchro-Vox and it gave off what is arguably the first and one of the creepier examples of Uncanny Valley in North American animation. Say what you will about the 1970s being a Dark Age for TV animation, but by that time that practice was no longer the least bit common. (Nowadays it's only very rarely used for comedic effect in cartoons and in The Annoying Orange series, where two of the same human eye and a human mouth are used to make talking inanimate objects.)
  • Clutch Cargo used the same technique, and started airing in 1959.
  • The Incredibles DVD had a bonus episode from the unreleased 1960s series with similarly cheap animation. Mr. Incredible and Frozone complain about every corner cut.
• The Night of the Headless Horseman 1999 CGI movie. Stiff 3D models attempting to be lifelike with motion capture, and cartoon-like with severely distorted expressions, combined with over the top voice acting, may cause the presentation to be scarier than the story.
• The Powerpuff Girls: The Powerpuffs. As the characters are designed to look ridiculously cute, they have rather big eyes, and a lack of fingers, toes, noses, and ears. A number of jokes in the show revolve around their appearance because of this, and there's even an episode that showed what would happen if the Freak Lab Accident never occurred and girls turn out to be the Run of the Mill Girls instead, without their unique cuteness features.
• The infamous Pingu episode Pingu Dreams became a banned episode because of a seal in his dreams, which looks very realistic. Here's the video.
• Jay Jay the Jet Plane is infamous for being in the Uncanny Valley. All the planes have human faces for some reason. It's even worse with the original puppet based version. All the humans are figures, the planes have an empty glazed stare, and their expression never changed.
• Anyone who's ever taken a German class and had to sit through episodes of the series Hallo Aus Berlin will have been subjected to Rolli und Rita, the creepiest creations ever to come out of computer animation. See for yourself.
• Glenn Martin, DDS: All of the characters look like an unholy hybrid between Sloth and Quasimodo.
• Invader Zim had the Irkens looking better than the humans. Dib, Gaz, and some of the adults could pass, but a lot of the other adults were....creepy. That lady with the weird boil on her head who lived next door to Zim may have been more scary than the invading aliens ever were.
• Quest for Zhu, a direct to DVD movie featuring some of the ugliest hamsters in cartoon history which look nothing like their toy counterparts.
• Phineas and Ferb manages to avert this because it's so highly stylized, but there are a few examples:
  • Disney made giant 3D costumes of the characters◊. To say it looks creepy is a semi-understatement.
  • The Pez dispensers of Ferb and Perry don't look too bad, but Phineas looks somewhat weird◊.
    • Really, any time you accidentally freeze-frame Phineas facing the front.
  • Balloony has the misfortune of having a realistic face.
• Bob the Builder: The dramastic redesigns in 2014, which made the humans more realistic looking (especially their mouths and eyes), were described by some as uncanny or creepy.
• Franklin in the Franklin And Friends series. It's an All-CGI Cartoon but the animation is actually pretty top quality. Everyone looks fine... Except for the turtles◊. The series is going for a realistic look but the turtles are just too cartoony.
• Rugrats: The original pilot. The animation is much more detailed and makes the characters look ugly or downright monstrous, especially the necks. It's also present in the first opening, used for six seasons and long after the animation and art style had become more pleasing to the eye.
• This poster for a live-action Marsupilami movie in France.
• Allen Gregory: The characters just look off. Allen himself suffers the most from this. He looks like a ventriloquist dummy with huge Vocal Dissonance.
• My Life Me: The characters move like marionettes and the character designs just look ''weird''.
• Some video series for little kids involves insects called Hermie the Caterpillar, an Animated Adaptation of a series of books by Max Lucado. Some of the bugs are just a little bit creepy, thanks to No Flow in CGI, but special mention goes to two ladybugs named Hailey and Bailey whose eyes are just too big for their vaguely human-looking faces.
• From My Little Pony generation 3.5, the Newborn "Cuties". Besides looking like they had a permanent "duck face," the size of their eyes compared to the rest of their bodies looks a little bit off◊.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
  • Rarity's overdone makeup job in Sonic Rainboom, which makes her look like she's trying out for RuPaul's Drag Race. Hilariously the animators got doing heavy makeup jobs down pat in time for Brotherhooves Social, where Big Macintosh is pretty easy on the eyes all painted up.
  • Ms. Harshwhinny is a unique case, being a character who was drawn to match the standard mare proportions and designs but doesn't reuse any flash assets and instead has a complete set of uniquely drawn expressions, body parts, eyes, etc. Put her beside a mare who does use the standard assets, and she kind of sticks out.
  • Some of the human characters in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls and its sequels wear lipstick, most prominently the human counterparts of Celestia and Luna. This wouldn't be so bad if their lips weren't then outlined, which has the unfortunate side effect of making it look like something is very wrong with their mouths.
  • The season 5 premiere does another in-universe example with the ponies who have supposedly found happiness in being fully equal. Pinkie Pie's first reaction is to say that there's something wrong about their smiles.
• Family Guy suffered from the uncanny valley for the first few seasons until it got popular enough to have a bigger budget. Most of the characters moved quite stiffly and facial expressions were also just as stiff. Peter also suffered from glitches in the animations, such as his eyes suddenly growing bigger or how his tongue stuck out in odd places when he talked. As the series progressed, the characters' movements improved and their facial expressions are a lot smoother. However, starting with season 6, the switch to Toon Boom averts this.
• Adventure Time makes use of this trope a lot when creating a character who is supposed to be off-putting. However, unlike characters such as Lemongrab, Marceline's Dad, and The Lich, there are some others that weren't intended to be that way:
  • Some fans had this reaction to Susan Strong. She has the same simple face, eyes, and head as the other characters, but has a disproportionately large body, and it is a very muscular, realistically-drawn body.
  • Sometimes, Cinnamon Bun falls into this trope, because of the way his mouth is drawn. His green eyes (prior to his redesign) were creepy, too.
• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius:
  • While the CGI is by all means decent for the standards of early 2000s computer animated TV shows, a lot of the character designs may get pretty ugly looking at times. Particularly in the Valentine's Day Episodes Love Potion 976/J, where the characters' mouths looked rather off.
  • Even worse were the crossovers with The Fairly OddParents!. When the Jimmy Neutron characters went into the Fairly Odd Parents cartoon and were animated in its 2D style, it was relatively okay, even if their character designs were strikingly different. But when the latter was rendered in Jimmy Neutron's 3D style... the results were terrible-looking◊.
• The 2010 reboot of Pound Puppies. Its art style is a odd mix of "cutesy" and "cartoonish" that often doesn't mesh well. The animation has improved significantly, thanks to production being moved to the same company that produces My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, but the first seven episodes are quite... interesting in their animation style.
• Recess:
  • The designs of the main six from the original pilot from Recess certainly falls into this (unfortunately, there's no image available). And while the whole thing hasn't been shown to the public, from the clips that were shown, the series pilot could also fall into this for those who are really used to the character designs in the show, as the gang were going to be more realistic.
  • Almost all of Toon City's episodes fall straight into the valley.
• Just about every short on KaBlam! except Sniz & Fondue and The Offbeats has this, but these are the worst offenders;
  • Garbage Boy and The Shizzagee from season four, the latter especially for the CGI which not only hasn't aged well, but was outdated even from the beginning when it was made in 2000, making it look slightly better than Vídeo Brinquedo.
  • The animation style of the Life With Loopy shorts tend to have this effect, though the fans will argue that after a while, it's just something you get used to. The pilot ("Goldfish Heaven"), however, falls much deeper into the valley due to its even cheaper look and rougher animation. This one shot of Larry laughing◊ falls there the deepest.
• This is a complaint levied by some viewers of certain of the human characters in Care Bears: Welcome to Care-a-Lot. Joy from "Sad About You" is a good example.
• The appearance of the Beauty and the Beast characters in the CGI interstitial segments shown on Disney Junior.
• While the characters on King of the Hill are mostly in line, there are a few occasions where they slip into this trope, like some of Hank's "bwaah" faces from a few early episodes.
• Disney's Electric Holiday's catwalk sequence shows some Disney characters with skinny bodies. While it wasn't so bad with the human characters, the Funny Animal characters look a little off.
• Thomas & Friends is this to some fans after the show's format was converted from using model trains to CGI with the characters actually moving their mouths while they talk.
• This is pretty prevalent in Storm Hawks Every person and thing moves awkwardly and resembles really, really, really poorly built robots.
• Almost anything drawn by animator Peter Chung, which includes works like his well known MTV cartoon series Æon Flux, and for doing animated stories for The Animatrix and the Dark Fury special in the Riddick series (also Reign: The Conqueror, but that one's an anime example due to being a Japanese/Korean co-production). Most of his characters (like Aeon Flux herself) look downright anorexic, and as Pan Pizza from RebelTaxi put it "is it possible to have TOO MUCH animation?", stating that the style really takes some getting used to.
• One of the most common complaints about the character designs in Code Lyoko is that the foreheads of most every character looks gigantic, and is often the butt of many a joke made by both fans and non-fans alike. Most people are usually able to look past this oddity once they really get into the show's character driven storylines (and later more complex plots).
• Archer: The stiff animation and semi-photorealistic character designs can cause this reaction in some viewers.
• Most of the human characters in George Pal's Puppetoons have cartoony and simplistic designs, so when a "realistic" one appears it tends to come across as unsettling.
• The Monster High movies try too hard to recapture the dolls' looks in CGI, and the results just look wrong most of the time. Luckily its spinoff Ever After High avoids this by sticking mostly to stylized Adobe Flash animation.
• Butt-Ugly Martians fell very deeply into this. One can argue that the titular martians is Stylistic Suck, but the humans are not. Keep in mind back in 2002, the CGI was considered poor.
• Strange Frame: Love & Sax features has hand-drawn animation that tries way too hard to look realistic. Also not helping things is the fact that it takes place in a future where genetic and cybernetic alterations are commonplace, resulting in a lot of characters who are nominally human but have extra limbs, doubled eyebrows or fur.
• Sealab 2021 intentionally looks jerky and bad to imitate old Hanna-Barbera cartoons (specifically Sealab 2020, the series it's based on), but it can still look unsettling to some.
• The 2015 reboot of Popples. Overly detailed human eyes with pupils, irises, highlights, eyelashes, and unnaturally stretched-out sclera on brightly colored Cartoon Creatures just doesn't look right.
• Zack and Quack: Although the characters are supposed to look like they're in a popup book, it's not hard to feel they just look weird.
• In Miraculous Ladybug, something about the animation is not quite right:
  • The series costs a lot (over $11 mil. USD) and it shows. The characters are very expressive but the character designs combined with this expressiveness can make them look uncanny. Certain characters also have a plastic look to them. The original animesque 2D trailer was far less in the valley.
  • Rose is really freaky looking compared to everyone else. She has huge eyes for some reason.
  • This music video of the shows french opening theme with the singers "interacting" with the CGI Ladybug and Cat Noir while roaming around Paris.
• This is one of the most likely reasons the Bratz DTV movies and TV show never really did well, as the characters look downright horrifying in CGI.
• Donkey Kong Country comes off as this, being one of the first All CGI Cartoons on television. The motion capture can look strange and bizarre by modern day standards, with plenty of jerky movement...
• Some of the exploring outside interstitial segments in latter installments of Wild Animal Baby Explorers feature someone wearing a full-body Sammy the skunk suit. While it seems to entertain the real kids featured in these segments, it can definitely have this effect for adult viewers.
• Steven Universe:
  • Smoky Quartz is one of the more human-like fusions, except their left hand divides into two, giving them an odd number of limbs in total.
  • While creative freedom is encouraged for storyboard artists, there are some insistences where the characters look off, such as Pearl being too stretched out, Amethyst appearing too bloated, and Steven's face misshaping. This was more notorious in the earlier episodes.
• Mega Babies is this in spades. Every human, especially the main trio, very hardly look as such.
• The infamous Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa special has it especially bad thanks to its severe budget problems during the production, easily making it among the absolute creepiest examples in animation history. The result has all the characters resembling mangled-up sex dolls who move in very robotic and unnerving ways. The backgrounds are no better as they appear to be some freakishly unnatural hybrid between hand-drawn and CG renderings, and the show in general more resembles the in-game graphics of some mid-90s PC game than a special released on television. On top of it all, the makers behind this had no experience in animation whatsoever.
• Descendants: Wicked World is an animated series that showed some of the worst of computer animation ever shown on screen. The character designs tried way too hard to capture the classic Disney style onto the cast of the 2015 TV film it is based on, and it does not look right whatsoever, and what is even worse is that the result ended up being too horrific for children to look at.
• Pretty much any Nickelodeon show based on a Dreamworks Animation movie. The shows have much, much lower-budget CGI than the movies do, and as a result the characters tend to look very strange, almost as if they're made out of clay. With The Penguins of Madagascar, the Penguins themselves don't look too bad◊, but King Julien and especially Maurice◊ and Mort barely resemble their movie counterparts. The characters in Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness don't fare any better◊, particularly Shifu. Monsters vs. Aliens (2013) is the worst of the bunch, to the point where the show looks more like a FMV of a PS1 game than a show released in 2013.
• Some of the characters in BoJack Horseman may come off as this considering that many of them are fully anthropomorphic animals with fairly detailed faces with realistic human proportions. Fully human characters such as Diane, Todd, and Sarah-Lynn are easier on the eyes than most other humans.
• The most common criticism of Big Mouth that many people agree with is the art-style, as all the characters have bizarre and overly-exaggerated proportions, resulting in some characters looking absolutely horrifying.
• Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory has been unfavorably compared to the infamous Legend Of Zelda CD-i games with regards to its animation and character designs that just look straight-up weird. So much so that it quickly became a joke among viewers to constantly "praise" the film for its "quality animation".
• There are many college animation demo reels that fall under this category. For instance: Crusaders the 2006 CG animation reel had different versions of the same two characters (the rock guy and the 242 girl) from both the picture and the separate parts of the video. The 242 girl especially given the animator tried so hard to use her emotion to look stern or angry; plus her big boobs differ; and at one point, jiggle awkwardly; even a couple shots show her visible cleavage window. Her different appearance may be a subject to Wardrobe Malfunction. (video and profile picture◊ here.)
• The CGI of Shadow Raiders does not hold up by today's standards - the animation resembles 3D video game cutscenes, while the main characters look like they have either been chipped out of solid stone or are related to nuts.
• Angela Anaconda has this in more than spades, but nothing's worse than Angela's baby sister, Lulu. She just stares into your soul...
• The early 2000s Action Man was one of the earliest All CGI Cartoons, and it shows. The characters look incredibly off and robotic by today's standards.
• The Flamin' Thongs^note Thong means Flip-Flop in Australian English features an animation style similar to Angela Anaconda, but is made even worse by the characters having realistic skin tones.
• WordWorld, a preschool All-CGI Cartoon. The characters and the entire world they live in... are made out of words. The faces of some of the cast look pretty robotic, and the Fridge Horror behind it^note Like, why this is pretty much the equivalent of our world being made out of human flesh! is also pretty nightmarish.
• Silly Symphonies: The eponymous goddess from the 1934 short The Goddess of Spring is an obviously early attempt by the Disney animators to draw more realistic humans. Her boneless "dancing" looks like a puppet with broken strings and is about as expressive.
• The pumkins in The Dancing Pumpkin and the Ogre's Plot have realistic human faces with (partially) noses and teeth. It also became a topic of a Saberspark video.
• Gaither's Pond suffers from this. The characters are pond animals, but they have the faces of their voice actors. This, combined with the primitive CGI, leads to an extremely ugly looking cartoon.
• Total Drama: Justin is the only character to have both irises and pupils, and one to the few male contestants to have prominent lips. This extra detail on his face is meant to draw attention to his in-universe good looks, but to the audience, it makes him one of the more awkward-looking contestants.
• Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet, another example of an All-CGI Cartoon from the early days, when the animators hadn't quite figured out how to make character designs just stylised enough to avoid falling down the valley. Which is an example of history repeating, because Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons sometimes suffered from the same problem with its more sophisticated, realistically-proportioned marionettes compared to earlier shows like Thunderbirds.
• The Numberjacks, the protagonists of a 2006 British children's programme, are anthropomorphic numbers who have huge, realistic eyes, as well as teeth and noses◊. Some would argue that this stylistic choice is justified, since the show being a cartoon/live-action hybrid and as such, the producers likely wanted the Numberjacks to have realistic faces to blend better with the live-action environments, but the designs are nevertheless off-putting to some viewers.
• Due to trying to do 3D animation on a small budget, a lot of the character designs in Pet Alien look very bizarre and inhuman. While the aliens look fairly cartoony and expressive for the time, the human characters like Tommy and Melba look very off-putting and unintentionally creepy because of their giant heads, bulging eyes and prominent teeth.

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