Burbanite

The Atlantic recently published an article on Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, and why many have been finding the title character’s face creepy rather than lovable. 

Tintin’s original face, while barebones, never suffered for a lack of expression. It’s now outfitted with an alien and unfamiliar visage, his plastic skin dotted with pores and subtle wrinkles. While all the characters sport some kind of cartoonish features—especially their ears and noses—their photorealistic eyes are somehow blank. In bringing them to life, Spielberg has made the characters dead. 

The Atlantic concluded that Tintin’s “dead” look is a result of the Uncanny Valley effect, a theory in the field of computer animation that states the more human a digital rendering attempts to be, the more repulsive it appears. There are several hypotheses that attempt to explain this effect, such as the Mortality Salience, a term used to describe people’s awareness of their eventual demise. From Wikipedia: 

Viewing an “uncanny” robot elicits an innate fear of death and culturally-supported defenses for coping with death’s inevitability…A mechanism with a human facade and a mechanical interior plays on our subconscious fear that we are all just soulless machines.

So I guess I won’t be seeing Tintin anytime soon. If I had to watch one digitally animated movie directed by a filmmaker famous for his work with live-action, I’d go with Hugo.