The Incredibles: Film Analysis

The uncanny valley concept was also discussed in 2004 in the CGI filed during the box office battle royal between two blockbuster films, Warner Brothers’ The Polar express and the Pixar’s The Incredibles. The uncomfortable feelings about the more accurate yet eerie characters in the Polar Express and the emotional warmth felt for Pixar’ stylized plastic family was subject for much critical debates because their releases coincided. The characters of The Incredible film looks like human but they cannot access a reality behind the traditional cartoon film character form. Cringing, embarrassment, exaggeration, pre-emotion are the basic principles of animation use to provide exercising joy of traditional animation between the audience and the film.

For Herge, the name that can convey his stories into the big screen is Spielberg. Also there was a discussion when the film was on the theaters about the uncanny valley was started. While the characters of Spielberg and Jackson were entering from a linear world into a world of photorealism, would they be able to go beyond the uncanny valley? Thanks to the motion capture technology, the film seems to have become more successful than the other samples until then. While it is the common opinion that films such as Final Fantasy and The Polar Express have fallen into the uncanny valley, the critics have made different comments about the Tintin. The phrase has cropped up a lot in early reviews of The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, referring to the strange effect created when animated characters look eerily lifelike. As New York magazine put it: “Tintin looks simultaneously too human and not human at all, his face weirdly fetal, his eyes glassy and vacant instead of bursting with animated life.” Shiven Sharma from the University of Ottawa, Canada, says “Our mind is more accepting of stylized representations. That’s why the Tintin movie looks so good. They’ve made photorealistic people out of the comic books. But they’re Tintin people—the way they’re shaded, and the way they’re proportioned, is all made to have the same visual style that Hergé created in the comic.” (Stu, 2011). Since the characters in the film are on a line between comic strips and photorealism, it is of a different approach from The Incredibles and The Polar Express. They are neither stylized human beings nor hyper-realistic characters. Nevertheless, the critics say that the characters created with detailed photorealism from simply drawn characters in original comics strips make the film fall in the uncanny valley. For