The art style and dark humor helped make old cartoons like The Tell-Tale Heart seem as scary as any horror film.

Why Robots, Dolls and Mannequins are Creepy The Uncanny Valley is a common unsettling, anxious, creepy feeling people experience when androids, robots, dolls, mannequins, video games and animations ...

Watch creepy, humanlike robot twitch and clench fists in new video The uncanny valley as envisioned by the roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. (Image credit: Creative Commons Smurrayinchester) ...

We've been talking a lot lately about the Uncanny Valley - the idea that the closer artificial humanity gets to real life, the more unsettling it becomes - and we've focused most of our discussion ...

ROBOT-MAKERS and the animators who design characters for films and video games face a paradox. People readily accept machines and cartoons that are simplifications or distortions of the human form.

But the grown-ups objected that the very realistic, almost-but-not-quite-human figures just seemed creepy. The movie is a classic example of the phenomenon known as “the uncanny valley.” ...

For example, normal cartoon characters, which are far less human-like than the CGI characters in The Polar Express, are generally not considered creepy. This highlights how it’s almost human ...

Creepy feeling. So why do we feel ... Many computer animation studios, including industry leader Pixar, shy away from characters that might get lost in the uncanny valley, preferring cartoon ...

A century ago, psychologists identified "the uncanny" as an experience that seems familiar yet foreign at the same time, causing some sort of brain confusion and, ultimately, a feeling of fear or ...