Does Tintin Take Us Past the Uncanny Valley into a Future of Hyperreal 3D Graphics?

When I first saw the trailer to The Adventures of Tintin, Tintin and friends seemed so creepy and artificial, I wrote on my Facebook wall, "Steven Spielberg just spent $200 million dollars to illustrate the Uncanny Valley." I haven't seen the movie itself yet, but Kevin Kelly has, and he had a similar reaction to mine, at first... but that quickly changed:

In the first few minutes... there is a momentary hesitation when you first see the face of the characters; a feeling they are just a bit shy of something. But that moment passes quickly and thereafter the humans (and animals) seem totally real. Their movements, skin texture, hair, expressions, eyes, everything says they are real-- even though they are only simulations. It helps that the environments are also 100% believable, including the elements of water, weather, atmosphere, sand, and city.

In fact, Kelly (who co-founded Wired magazine), thinks this hyperrealism has taken us past the Uncanny Valley to a new era of 3D graphics:

[A]udiences will accept totally synthetic actors, filmmakers will begin to explore the limits of the hyperreal... I'm expecting that for the next ten years or so, directors will create more and greater hyperreal films, until we tire of it (like we have with hyperreal high dynamic range still photography). And then we'll see shaky, gritty, unfocused, hand held camcorder type totally synthetic worlds as well. And every variety of in-between hybrid worlds.

Read it all here. I imagine the same prediction could apply to next gen gaming and virtual worlds. But again, I haven't seen Tintin yet to tell. Your take?

Comments

[Isadora Fiddlesticks]

i loved the series and i also loved the movie adaptation...it was really engaging! very good movie :)) everything was done so well...:)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I think Tintin is just stylized enough in terms of character rendering to stay on the far side of the uncanny valley.

It's lovingly detailed and rendered, and the characters have a brilliant life all their own. But it's cartoon life, not human life.

It reminds me a bit of Norman Rockwell's style; that attention to realistic detail combined with a stylized sensibility of the human form that draws the viewer to embrace the elements of charicature through the sheer warmth and good humor of the piece.

But I by no means analyzed it in those terms while watching. Whatever else it is, it's a rip-roaring good action movie.

[Psion]

I tend to agree with Arcadia. While Tintin himself had human proportions, he was also the most "difficult" to look at. The other characters all had exaggerated proportions; big noses, slightly enlarged heads, etc. that made them stylized representations of people rather than accurate. That said, it wasn't very long before I simply accepted the characters as real ... the extraordinary realism of the landscapes they inhabited had a hand in this.

The other thing I noticed while watching the movie was the use of action. Kelly touches on this briefly, but there were a few sequences that were so over-the-top that they jarred my perceptions. The exaggerated action became cartoonish even though every element looked "hyperreal" (as Kelly calls it), and the result shook me from my complacent acceptance of the story and reminded me how much of what I was seeing was man-made. The motorcycle chase, for example, and the moment when the good Captain got caught-up in the plane's propeller.

The perfect capture of every detail married with the ability to bring anything imaginable to life doesn't bode for a perfect cinematic marriage. This couple will fight quite a bit on the big screen as directors learn finesse and subtlety.

[Pep]

Beowulf did it better

Pep (five years ago)