Constraint, Toy Story and the Uncanny Valley

Toy Story: The Art and Making of the Animated Film

I recently picked up a terrific book by John Lasseter “Toy Story: The Art and Making of the Animated Film”. Thinking about creative process always drives me towards the animation industry and in particular Pixar Studios. Their ability to maintain a creative edge over an extended period of time is an exemplar of creative process under constraints.

It had been a while since I had looked at Toy Story, the catalyst of Pixar's rise to fame, that I decided to revisit the original work. Apart from the wide breadth of concept work that went into the construction of the film a passage by John Lasseter stood out to  me.

“To me there's no object that can't become a personality" pg14

Lasseter is referring here to the inanimate objects that were cunningly brought to life in the making of the film. However in order to make the personality fit the object, Lasseter goes on to say that you have to apply certain restrictions to your character. He reflects that in the design of the toy soldiers from the film he decided that the soldiers had to move according to their basic state. ie. a plastic soldier cannot move like a regular flash and blood human. The movement is constrained by the nature of the object. A more recent example is that of Lightning McQueen. A car cannot suddenly grow hands and stand up on his rear tyres like a biped. He must move like a real car would.

In a sense the great sense of character that imbues a lot of Pixar’s work comes from constraint. Once again the imposition of limitations provides fertile stimulus for creative output.

This leads me onto the idea of constraint leading us away from the “Uncanny Valley”. The Uncanny Valley is a theory that states “when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.” (Wikipedia) The theory was first presented by Masahiro Mori in 1970. He cited examples of Robots being very close human likeness that people had a adverse reaction to them. His theory has been cited in the field of animation most notably in films such as Polar Express and Beowulf.

The Uncanny Valley. Wikipedia

What is interesting to me is that the abstract nature of characterized inanimate objects by default avoids this problem of repelling the audience. So in a sense can it be said then that constraint can lead us back to reality?















Uncanny valley. (2012, May 8). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:16, May 12, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uncanny_valley&oldid=491398786