It is was the title says, if you ever find yourself a zombie then you’re doomed. Naturally this is all if you care about the Uncanny Valley first put into a graph by the japanese robotist Masahiro Mori. I’ll come
back to the Valley a little later in this blog. First I’d like to indulge myself into the uncanny and what it is.
The uncanny is the unsettling feeling of something alive but not quite. Its origins spring back to Germany where Ernst Jentsch (1867-1919 as seen on the picture from 1906) described it as either Heimlich or Unheimlich. Homely or unhomely. His way of telling us what the uncanny is, is highly based on intelligence. It’s a physical form that takes shape as an inanimate object
looking life like, enough to fool us, but our brain know it isn’t alive on its own. For an example let’s take Evie.
Evie is the AI found here: https://www.eviebot.com/en/
She is the very definition of the uncanny according to Ernst. She looks real but we know as humans she’s not. She’s an AI. Her name EVIE stands for Electronic Virtual Interactive Entity, and she was created far back in the 1988’s by the company Existor.com. The “dad” behind Evie is Rollo Carpenter and he says on the webpage which I will link at the bottom of the page, that, when he first discovered how to make a program learn, he made her. And she still learns new things to do this day.
What Evie does, is that she’s an interactive application on the web. People can log onto the webpage and start talking to her, she’ll then answer back from all the things she’s learned over the years. And by now her answers are pretty straight forward and clever, almost human like. And that’s what the uncanny is about. That creepy sensation of something so real but so fake is talking at us, acting like us, pretending to be us.
Ernst wasn’t the only one dwelling on the topic of the uncanny, another very famous Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had taken interest in this. He is rightfully named the father of psychoanalysis. He had a passion for dreams and what dreams could mean to the people having them. But opposite Ernst, Sigmunds way of defining the uncanny aspires from the unconscious of the human mind, it’s based on emotion and things the awake mind, our conscious, can’t grasp or even be aware of. To him, the uncanny belongs to the realm of fright, that it evokes fear and dread. Our mind is a puzzle box, and because of this we unconsciously know to fear the known, such as death and that inanimate objects like dolls creep us out. But we in 0ur awake state and consciousness, don’t think this over.
According to Sigmund the human mind has two sides, the unconsciousness and the consciousness. The dorment side, where our dreams take shape is the unconscious. It only truly comes to form when we are asleep and our consciousness is on a break. It’s no wonder Sigmund adored the ides of dreams and how the uncanny lies within us all along, but we don’t know it.
There’s a wonderful quote from another prominent person on this topic, and that’s Helen Cixous who is born in 1937 and it goes: “Death does not have any form in our life. Our unconscious makes no place for the representation of our mortality.” And it does. We as human beings, mortal as it comes, don’t invite death into our daily life and thoughts. We are aware its the end of the line, and we all have to go there -but- it is an entire different life and mind. When the time comes it isn’t us who experiences it, it’s a whole new chapter we can’t comprehend as it is right now.
With all this in mind, the Uncanny Valley comes back to importance. 
This is the Uncanny Valley and as I said from the beginning, if you’re a zombie you migth as well give up straight away. Because you are at the very bottom of the valley and there’s no escape from that. You as the zombie, is the outmust ultimate uncanny and we dread you more than anything. Because you’re alive but you’re not. You keep on walking around us but you’re stone dead. You move your eyes and wish to eat our brains but you’re dead. You were once a loved one but when you come at us with your sharp teeth and hissing we have no remorse in removing your head from your shoulders and then stamp through your brain. You are the definition of the Uncanny when it comes to Mori’s Valley.
At the middle of the graph are dolls and stuffed animals. And this Valley is of great importance to animators, because we need to avoid creating zombies for our audiance. Animators has a tough job as we bring things to life, and not neccessarily things originally meant to be alive! One of the greater examples of animation where something uncanny is greatly avoid is Disney’s Pinnochio.
Admit it, you don’t like dolls but you don’t exactly find the wooden doll 
who tries to be a human boy uncanny, do you? He’s pleasant to look at, there’s nothing repulsive about him. And that’s exactly that, he isn’t repulsive. Now, if we wanted to make Pinnochio part of the uncanny we’d have to change him a bit. At the moment Disney’s animators have done a good job him making him cute and sweet looking, with his round and soft lines. The doll itself, is of wood and isn’t one of those creepy clown dolls we see in old houses.
So in order to make Pinnochio uncanny we’d have to remove his soft features and alter his material. We could also alter his personality to something more sinister so his motives are a bit more dark. Perhaps we could follow the original Pinnochio where the doll goes through a lot of trials before he learns the true value of being human. He ends up in jail and burns off his own foot! That’s not very child like.
Or we could go a whole outer route and look at the story that sat all this in motion. Far back in time. In 1823 a creepy novel was published in France, by the young woman Mary Shelley (1797-1851). This novel was titled “Frankenstein.”
Now you might raise an eyebrow and question my argument to why Pinnochio and Frankenstein are alike or how Mary set all this in motion. But she did. With her novel of the Frankenstein monster she explored a new era of horror classics. It was the perfect time in science and history for her to write this novel. Science had begun questioning what kept the human body alive, what was our life source. Scientists conducted public experiments on dead bodies where electricity was sent through the carcasses and had the limbs twitch and move on their own. The french revolution had just happened not too long before her time. And from that people visibly feared removal of limbs and beheadings. As it had happened in public in front of their eyes with the noble society executed on the streets.
So her timing was perfect. She added all these fears into one story, of a man who created his own monster. The difference between Pinnochio and Frankenstein monster is that the monster is repulsive. He is disgusting. He is made out of dead bodies and stitched together with enough lightning going through them to move permanently and create a spark in the brain that had it live. And live it did. It lived so much that Doctor Frankenstein dreaded it, he came to hate his own creation.
Pinnochio and Frankenstein share story but end so differently. Pinnochio was created out from a wish, by an old man who always had wanted a son of his own. Doctor Victor Frankenstein created his monster out of obssession with beating death. There was no love involed, it was pure science and to prove a point.
When Pinnochio is brought alive by the fairy he has a father role to take care of him and help him become a boy. Naturally it doesn’t go all smooth but he has a father who loves him and want him to succeed in becoming real. Doctor Victor Frankenstein doesn’t exactly do this to his creation. When the monster is brought to life he quickly realizes this isn’t good. And with that he neglects the monster and refuses to help it understand the world. The monster itself isn’t dumb, he’s smart with a high intelligence and he understands he’s all alone, he understands that he’s not like the others. He understands he is uncanny. Because he knows he was created and that no one else is like him. But the important part which in the story has Doctor Victor Frankenstein reconsider his actions and listen to his monster. Is that the monster has reason. He has a will to live and a passion to live with someone else. He is okay with being who he is, if he isn’t to go through the torment and pain alone. He tries to reason with his creator and does give a good argument. He has a right to live, because he was brought into life. The good Doctor can’t deny this and agrees to make the monster a mate. But as the new creation is about to be finished he destroys it. Ruining the only chance his monster had of happiness in this eternal torment. The monster goes berserk and enters a killing spree.
The difference in the stories are the beginnings. Doctor Victor refuses his monster a chance, and find him repulsive. He pushes his own child away from him and won’t have anything to do with it. Where as Pinnochio’s dad welcomes him with open arms and love.
There’s consequences in all actions we take, and Victor made a wrong decision from the beginning. He played God.
Bibliography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/freud_sigmund.shtml
nadiadalgaard 