Uncanny Valley

I haven't seen any robots or anything that actually look real enough up-close to creep me out. Mannequins don't bug me and almost nothing evokes an "OMG, CORPSE!" response.

Real humans are far more creepy than things manmade! When was there ever a serial killer or pedophile that looked anything but 'normal' or 'average'?

 

I was a kid when I watched that movie and I was thinking the same thing!

It's kinda like: OMG! That baby's got a knife and we can't get it away!

 

I can't say I've every experienced this with BJDs. Even blank dolls don't weird me out. I see them more like blank canvases. I think it's because, in my mind, they still don't look close enough to human. They have all the wrong perfections/imperfections: they have smooth perfect skin, but they have seams. Their limbs bend, but you can see the joints.

However, I got seriously creeped out when watching the special about Reborns. It was the Uncanny Valley: they looked so real I expected them to move. When they didn't my mind made the jump to "omg dead baby", which creeped me out.

 

i usually read through the whole debate thread before i post but this comment made me stop in my tracks and i just wanted to say something about it.

like Taco i myself am completely and utterly terrified of the jerky movements that characters like this make in movies. another good example if anyone is interested, Ringu Zero, Tale of Two sisters and various other asian inspired horror films. like the grudge which kinda scarred me for life O_O. anyways, i could never understand, until this was posted, why i feel this way. it doesn't matter if the character being shown is male or female. like in the exorcism of emily rose, when her boyfriend wakes up and she is on the floor in the strangest position staring at him blankly and unmoving. or even today i saw a commercial for a new horror movie. there was a part where a guy was crawling up these stares and his head turned all the way to the side in the jerkiest movement.

perhaps i have finally come to understand that this has to do with the UV? i find this all fascinating to be honest. sometimes when i think about these movies where there are human figures making impossible, and unhuman like movements i feel frightened. so maybe thats why, ( sorry that was a little off topic?)

my girl does not usually frighten me. there are times when i look at her and i feel like she is watching me. not in a way that i feel threatened, but in a way that i am aware of her presence the way i would be if she were human. most dolls do not usually scare me. what maybe someone can explain to me is going in the opposite direction of what was discussed. as in, you are not afraid of something such as a doll, but then you grow to fear it. i used to have a bunch of dolls, all different makes some barbies some porcelain, that would stand on my shelf. one night, when i was in highschool, i looked over at them and felt so frightened by them being there i put them away in my closet. i have barley touched them since. i never had a bad experience with them so i am not sure if that is related to the UV or not. i am also afraid of clowns...but who wouldn't be?

there was another poster who mentioned this, but it is other people that i am more worried about then my doll. my doll may be a little weird but i feel like her kind face offsets any of the weirdness i might be feeling. even though i know a lot of the characters that frighten me are technically ghosts in those movies, there is something that i feel i relate to in them. they technically look like me in the sense that they are 'human', and maybe it is the fact that i could be that that is frightening? once again probably off topic but i am so happy i finally figured this out.

 

For some reason that hasn't happened to me with the "commercial" ABJDs, that's it, the ones everyone in this forum owns. However, when I look at OOAK more... Artistic dolls like the ones in http://homepage3.nifty.com/mnemosyne/top.htm or http://www.miudoll.com/ , to name a few, I experience this Uncanny Valley thing, for sure! I don't know why, but I think we can all tell the differences, and these last ones have "something", and beside, they're usually between 60 and 80cm, so they could be like little children. They creep me out but at the same time they make me fall in love. It's some sort of morbid feeling. Maybe the way most of the websites are designed don't help either to the creepiness ^^U

 

I think I do get a bit of Uncanny Valley syndrome under certain circumstances with dolls, but the longer I have them the less it happens. The joints did weird me out at first, especially when they are bent to the point of being open. Now I'm used to that. It's not to the point of being creeped out, but I don't care for my dolls to be in unnatural or uncomfortable-looking positions.

Mostly I notice it with eyes. When the eyes aren't placed right, or even looking too long directly into a pair of eyes in their boxes (when they let you check out the glass eyes before buying them), I have gotten mildly creeped out. At other times I think glass eyes peering out of the black foam can be kind of endearing ^o^;.

I do think, like many previous posters, that the Uncanny Valley is a big reason that people can be scared of dolls. My friend claimed that my first one (SD Mark) looks like "he's about to go for your throat." ^^;;;

 

I agree with you that half of it is the website design and photography. I am not creeped by those dolls, but the website photography appears designed to look a little morbid or victorian. The second site has a lot of disembodied heads staring out and one picture is a bunny's head in a box with flowers like it's a decorative object. I suspect these things don't bug me because it seems to be an artistic trend to show your dolls, puppets or figures in this "Victorian" dark, slightly morbid way for the last few years and I have looked at many such websites, some of them done up by my friends, and at least one of them involving artistic Victorian taxidermy (which did make me go "ugh" at first). I was into old Victorian era porcelain dolls as a younger person and saw many photos of such dolls in all kinds of settings. A lot of stuff from that era is morbid because the people/ culture apparently was death-obsessed to a degree, so you see things like photographs taken after a person died but with the corpse propped up and eyes painted on to make it look alive, and all kinds of "memento mori" stuff.

If you saw those same dolls photographed out in the bright sunshine in pretty dresses having a pretend tea party they probably wouldn't be half so nerve wracking.

 

that's exactly what my friend say about my dollie XD then he showed me the clip and i agree, it is a little creepy....XD
but it's all a state of mind, really.

 

I think it’s the mysteries of the Uncanny Valley that brought me to these dolls (I love that expression, by the way. I’ve never heard it before).
I must explain I’m no kid. I’m old enough to be a mother to most people on this List. One day my 14 year old begged me for some crazy expensive imported dolly, and somehow, despite my oath that we would never have such a silly thing in the house, this strange white creature arrived in a battered box from the other end of the world. And she made eye contact with me the second they unrolled her from her cheap shiny blanket. And I noticed how my daughter (who never touched a doll) would coo under her breath when she dressed this thing, and would call it “sweetheart”, and I found I couldn’t stand to have this object’s hair fall over its eyes. I had to push it back. And then I had to buy her different eyes, that focused even more sharply. And then I had to order another doll “for my daughter” to keep the first one company.
I know they aren’t alive. But I’d never twist their bodies the way bodies don’t twist, or hold them upside-down. I wouldn’t like the way they’d look at me…

 

Ahaha. This reminds me of the time my mom helped me get my boy's boots on for the first time. She was iffy about dolls, but was happy to see how I warmed up to them. Now she insists on fussing with his hair, even though she thought he was creepy at first and hates it when his knee kicks out and twists backwards.

 

I have a friend who is scared of MOST of my dolls, he says there is just something to human, yet not, about them... (plus he's seen dollmaster) when he said he was scared of dolls he had to defend that it didn't include Barbies and such, because they're jsut not real.

He doesn't mind my elven F-13 though, infact i caught him playing with Bobby once, because he says the ears remind him it's not real...

I get the strange feeling somtimes about how real they seem, (usually whilst sleep deprived) I've thought that they seem like they should move, react if you touch them, but they don't... it is slightly creepy sometimes... But i love 'em ^^

 

How nice of you to say so!

 

Its OT but can I just say how awesome you are? I would -love- for my mum to love my BJDs but she doesn't at all. I wish my mum was supportive like you!

 

You're a sweetheart!
We mums are a strange lot, and are supportive in our own unique ways. My daughter might just wish I'd get my middle aged nose out of her hobby.

 

I think dolls fall into the uncanny valley mostly because of non-doll people. Our BJDs are mostly made to resemble people, idealized as they may be. Our brain is generally hardwired to feel either great fear or great fondness for things that resemble ourselves but aren't human. I know I get the feeling when I come into my room and my meis arms or legs have fallen out of position, or she's in a different spot than where I left her (I have many room mates). It's a small, illogical shock.

 

strangly i fall in love with these kind of realistic dolls.... thats why i like my dollstown dolls...

 

What an interesting topic!
I can imagine that people experience this Uncanny Valley thing with dolls, but I don't... I'm also not afraid of corpses. If a corpse started moving, THEN I'd be scared XD

On the other hand, some dolls DO freak me out. You know, the kind with the huge, staring eyes. They look insane to me and it's like they're saying "I'm gonna get you." or something @__@; The more realistic a doll looks, the more comfortable, methinks.

 

I don't find BJDs Uncanny at all, but that's because they aren't human sized and there is something about them that doesn't look 100% real to me. The girls that I'm looking at buying have quite large eyes, so they don't look like mini people.

I would agree with Krissy about Reborns - I really can't see the appeal, especially in the ones that have a 'breathing' mechanism. I remember seeing a documentary where a woman was walking hers around in a pram and behaving like it was a real child. I found that very unnerving.

 

To add my two cents- we were actually talking about this in my facial animation class the other day. In a chart of the uncanny valley he showed us, the Japanese masks were listed inside the valley, but on the upswing.

Often our dolls are said to fit into the same category as the masks because they have the same ability to seem to change moods depending on the angel. That said, officially our dolls sit into that valley.

Does that mean the creep everyone out? No, obviously- but clowns don't scare everyone either. And hey, even corpses and zombies are in the uncanny valley!