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Unintentional Uncanny Valley - TV Tropes

  • ️Sun Jun 05 2022

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Unintentional Uncanny Valley (trope)

And this is why things that are close to humankind (yet aren't quite there) are scary.

"Within the realm of the familiar, we find comfort and connection. Venture too close to the unknown, and the familiar can become hauntingly strange."

In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed in his book The Uncanny Valley that the more human a robot acted or looked, the more endearing it would be to a human being. For example, most lovable Robot Buddies look humanoid, but keep quirky and artistically mechanical affectations. However, at some point, the likeness seems too strong and yet somehow, fundamentally different — and it just comes across as very strange. At that point, the acceptance drops suddenly, changing to a negative reaction. It doesn't necessarily invoke fear, though; for some people, the reaction is similar to Narm or unintentional comedy. Either way, you don't feel the same about that character as you would a human, or even something less realistic.

Shown in a graph (like the one in the image), with increasing humanity on the X axis and acceptance on the Y axis, there is a slow rise, then a sudden drop, then a sudden peak as "normal" is reached. Masahiro Mori referred to this as the "uncanny valley". This video explains it extremely well.

Thus, things that look somewhat human, but are clearly not — such as C-3PO (in Star Wars) or Animated Armor — produce an accepting reaction, while things that are nearly human, but just a bit off — such as a child's doll, a ventriloquist's dummy or a clown — produce a negative response. For some people, the resonance is stronger with a moving object; a corpse is creepy, but a moving corpse is even more. As another example, some people might find zombies too inhuman to be uncanny, but give them stiff, unnatural movement and they suddenly become much scarier.

This may also apply to sound as well: for example, a voice speaking at a higher or lower pitch than is humanly possible, or a recording of a human voice played backwards. Or maybe a computer voice like Microsoft Sam. Though, again, some people just find the effect comical.

The uncanny valley effect applies strongly to CGI animated films and video games. As time passes, computer artists are able to create more realistic graphics, but convincing realistic movements and expressions are still a challenge, even with Motion Capture. More stylized animation can avoid the effect, but aiming for realism can easily dip into the valley. It also doesn't help that more detailed graphics require more work to make them move realistically; if the model looks realistic but its animations are cartoony, it'll just look wrong.

A bit of light stylization goes a long way. Even 2D animators learned this lesson in the earliest days of animation; heavily rotoscoped characters tend to look less appealing than hand-animated characters, especially when they coexist in the same production. See the Fleischer Studios version of Gulliver's Travels for an example.

A character in the valley is not necessarily a bad thing, and can still be sympathetic despite appearing unsettling. This can lead to Narm Charm, where you find yourself crying over or rooting for a character who initially creeped you out.

While it is usually known to be unintentional, it can be deliberately invoked for the audience or even the characters in the work — see the main Uncanny Valley trope for examples of that. Some examples of particular ways to intentionally produce this effect are Creepily Long Arms, Creepy Long Fingers, Malevolent Masked Men, Undead Barefooter, Undeathly Pallor, Body Horror, and Uncanny Valley Makeup. Tropes such as Creepy Doll, Demonic Dummy, Everyone Hates Mimes and Monster Clown may exist because of this trope, as such characters' full-face makeup and oddball behavior can rate as invoked examples of it. Also compare Mundane Horror, when the effect is applied to storylines and situations rather than characters.

See also Reality Is Unrealistic, where the poor impression comes less from being "creepy" as from breaking existing conventions which audiences had come to expect. In addition, there's Off-Model, Bishōnen Line, No Flow in CGI, and Ugly Cute. And while you're at it, see What Measure Is a Non-Cute?, as the scientific study of that trope gave birth to this one. An opposite is Eldritch Abomination, where the unsettling effect is caused by being too unfamiliar rather than being too human, yet still produces the same effect (although the two can overlap as a Humanoid Abomination). Furries Are Easier to Draw is a way artists get around the effect; it's easy for drawn humans to dip into the valley, but a cartoony talking animal doesn't evoke the same response.

Note: Please do not add Real Life examples here. While there have been attempts to apply this theory to real life, it is most often used to justify discrimination. People are not artificial creations.


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Anime & Manga 

  • Invoked frequently in AKIRA both intentionally and unintentionally thanks to the older and surreal art style. The characters most guilty of this trope are the psychic children Masaru, Takashi and Kiyoko. Tetsuo counts as well... even before he becomes a giant fleshy fetus blob.
  • BanG Dream! is usually pretty good at avoiding "oversized CGI head pasted atop mo-capped musician" during the musical numbers, but occasionally it'll be very obvious how awkward and floaty the digital heads look when they hover jankily over bodies with naturalistic movements, like episodes 12 and 13 of 2nd Season. It seems to particularly affect drummers, probably due to the complex arm movements forcing them to use specific angles. But it also crops up in very wide shots too, like the intro of "Returns" in episode 12.
  • Berserk:
    • Miura's new art style can cause this reaction in fans, especially compared to his older style, the broader lines and more "cutesy" design is jarring to some readers. It's likely due to Miura's change from ink to digital drawing.
    • Berserk: The Golden Age Arc in general suffers from this due to a lot of Conspicuous CG, which many fans deplored. Just see the background characters. It's especially disconcerting during the big story moments — e.g., Guts One-Man Army moment — which look like something out of a video game compared to Berserk (1997). The third movie looks much better thanks to using the CG smartly — most of the characters' bodies are computer-animated but still have 2D heads, blending the styles effectively.
    • Berserk (2016) suffered severe backlash from fans due to all of the characters essentially being CGI mannequins. Nobody looks natural, the faces don't react, and all of the "talking" moments feel like someone trying to tell a story in Garry's Mod. There are some moments in which 2D animation is used, which is a relief when it happens, but those moments are few and far between. The Blu-ray DVD release uses more 2D moments and removes some of the Barbie Doll Anatomy censoring for nudity, but fans were still unimpressed.
  • City Hunter 91 and Angel Heart use a realistic, sketch-like art style to depict main characters' serious/dramatic faces, which easily come off as uncanny. The worst offenders are Ryo and Kaori themselves in the Angel Heart anime, where their voice acting bounces all over the place and doesn't match the expressions, making the issue even weirder.
  • Dragon Ball:
  • A common criticism of Dr. STONE is that the female characters' faces often look... off, with their default expressions normally having vacant, glassy, unnaturally spaced "doe-eyes" and comparatively tiny mouths and noses (something which is not seen in the male characters). It's even led to jokes that their disturbing appearance is due to them being inbred, since it's eventually revealed that the inhabitants of Ishigami Village are all descended from a small group of astronauts.
  • EX-ARM's anime adaption is an All-CGI Cartoon animated with motion capture (which had little if any editing) and an "animation" company who mostly known for making background assets for FromSoftware games. The final result is extremely stiff yet jittery models who can only open/close their mouths, barely any of the characters can deviate from their default expression, and their unblinking eyes stare into an abyss only they can see.
  • The Flowers of Evil (and the author Shuzo Oshimi's other works — Inside Mari, Happiness, and Blood on the Tracks) is a rare example of Rotoscoping in the medium. Because of this, some of the characters look... off from real-life people, let alone their original manga designs.
  • Gantz is chock-full of this, with City Hunter-esque characters put up against Nightmare Fuel monsters straight from the Junji Ito playbook. The mix of stylized elements with hyper-realistic designs can be both visually stunning and unnerving as hell. The film Gantz: O only intensifies this trope by rendering Oku's already uncanny art style in CG, with predictable results.
  • Gokujou!! Mechamote Iinchou has this all over the place. The animation switches from hand-drawn to cel-shaded CGI without warning, the characters, when in CGI-mode, can't even blink very well, and can't move their eyes—in order to face another direction, they have to turn their entire head. Later episodes seem to use the CGI a bit better, though the non-human characters still look terrifying.
  • In Hen, the artist's grasp of human anatomy can get a little loose at times.
  • A lot of works by Junji Ito thanks to his distinctive art style. It works great for his usual horror works, but it becomes hilarious (and a bit unsettling) when he continues using it for stuff like Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, a silly comic about his wife's cats.
  • In Jagaaaaaan, even normal humans are prone to disturbingly wide eyes and exaggerated mouths that wouldn't look out of place on a Titan.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • In Mekakucity Actors, the intro of episode 9 is supposed to be a cute, heartwarming montage of Kido, Kano, Seto, and Ayano growing up together, but it's kind of spoiled by the CGI models, particularly the faces, which are creepy as hell (especially when they smile). The redone version for the BD sets, by comparison, is in 2D and does a much better job of trying to be cute.
  • Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors is a World War II propaganda film and one of the first attempts at animating more realistic faces. The results range from odd-looking to downright scary.
  • Naruto: Mikio Ikemoto's style in Boruto is far less appealing than Kishmoto's older work due to the combine factor of less stylized art and Artistic Age for characters like Sarada.
  • One Piece:
  • Ponyo: Granmanmare, due to her design being slightly more realistic than the traditionally Miyazaki-esque characters that surround her.
  • Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness due to being a CG anime like Advent Children or Gantz: O runs into this trope. The realistic visuals mixed with outlandish and stylised elements makes for a disconcerting effect especially in non-action scenes. Characters like Leon and Claire also given more realistic appearances compared to how they looked in the previous CG media. It’s especially notable when characters are walking, e.g when Leon is walking back to the White House in the Season 1 ending, he moves with an unnatural gait.
  • Rick and Morty: The Anime: This quickly became one of the most common criticisms from fans, as the anime tries to combine the normal Rick and Morty designs with more exaggerated anime proportions and expressions, leading to a bizarre and uncanny style that tries to resemble Rick and Morty but ends up looks incredibly off-putting compared to the normal show due to the anime influences.
  • Sailor Moon Crystal
    • The show is full of cheap/inconsistent animation, and the 3D movements especially throw a lot of people off. Especially in this trailer/music video, where the girls do a Team Power Walk that comes off more creepy and lumbering than badass.
    • A common criticism of Crystal is that it tries to copy the manga's artstyle too closely resulting in anatomy and facial issues.
    • Crystal's version of Chibi-Usa is basically an adult head running around on a toddler body. Every scene with her just screams wrongness.
  • Shirokuma Cafe falls into this trope with its animal characters as they are drawn in a rather photorealistic looking style.
  • Soul Eater Not! gives the returning characters from Soul Eater a cutesy and more realistic Moe redesign that just looks off and wrong. This is considered one of the main reasons the show didn't do very well.
  • Suicide Island has an art-style that, in general, has this effect on the humans. Overall, the scenery is done well, but the humans are drawn a bit sketch-like and the tendency of having an emphasis on big noses makes them feel a little unsettling.
  • The cat family featured in the 1947 anime Suteneko Tora-chan look a little creepy with faces that mostly look like real faces.
  • Most of the characters in the 1982 anime film adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz use cartoony designs, which makes characters like Dorothy look a bit off.
  • ×××HOLiC's anime adaptation sometimes veers into this. The manga's art style depicts people with very long, slender limbs; while this doesn't look so bad in still images, it didn't translate as well to animation, as the characters frequently go Off-Model with bizarre proportions and wildly inconsistent heights.

Asian Animation 

Comic Books 

  • Alex Ross' "photorealistic" painted style, seen in Kingdom Come and Marvels, falls into this sometimes due to how ridiculously detailed he makes his characters.
    • A quote from Kingdom Come regarding the Brainwashed and Crazy Captain Marvel sums it up well, even if it's not entirely an In-Universe example.

      "Captain Marvel mills about, his eerie smile carving a swath through Batman's ranks. No one breathes in his presence. "What is thinking?" they wonder. "What will he do next?". To them, he is shark trawling for prawn. I have heard him called the world's mightiest mortal. No doubt. The intimidation his mere presence exudes is uncanny."

    • Ross also uses paints when acting as inker for another artist's pencils. If the penciler's style is too different from Ross', the resulting combination of their styles can look weird. Example: Ross painting over Jim Lee's art. It goes to an extreme when Ross painted over a Bruce Timm portrayal of the cartoon versions of Justice League, here: a hyper-realistic style over a very unrealistic cartoonish style.
  • Scott McCloud's Making Comics has a few pages of faces showing various basic facial expressions as a guide to how that kind of thing works. As McCloud himself admits, they're creepy as hell. His drawn face with big blank glasses can also look fairly soulless sometimes.
  • Spider-Man:
    • Spidey hits this trope, which is why he's a case of Creepy Good; the costume is just startling, even compared to other super-heroes' costumes, since it basically gives him a round, blank face that's featureless save for two huge, white, ever-staring eyes (even creepier when Doctor Octopus puts glass lenses on the mask in Superior Spider Man). The garish red and blue costume is creepy enough, even despite the bright colors (or perhaps because of them, since brightly colored, in nature, typically means "Danger! Poison!"), but when he wears some of his darker costumes, like the black-and-white one that eventually became The Symbiote, it's only heightened. To this unsettling appearance is added his inhuman flexibility; if you look closer, you'll see that a lot of the poses that Spidey so casually strikes are extremely awkward, if not impossible, for an ordinary human to achieve, which further makes him look like a monster. Add to this the Paranoia Fuel his Wall Crawling abilities give him (meaning he can come at you from anywhere, at any angle), and it's surprising just how spooky that is. Still, this trope has backfired a lot with Spider-Man, as his design is near-universally loved, being the most marketable superhero. It's extremely common to see children dress up as Spidey in and out of universe, so it's more likely because Spidey is distrusted by the public (since he doesn't look like the archetypal superhero) that he causes the Uncanny Valley effect on people. However, out of universe, he's the flagship character of Marvel Universe, so he generally avoids this trope.
  • Similarly to Alex Ross, Mike Deodato's art can have this effect on readers, sometimes to a greater extreme. While his heavily detailed, almost 3D-looking realistic style (seen in Secret Avengers, Dark Avengers and Fear Itself) is very impressive, it's also disconcerting when it comes to the more outlandish characters like Spider-Man and the Thing. Also, in general, Deodato's focus on the musculature of the male characters in their costumes, while far from Liefeldian, still dips into the valley to the point that they can resemble action figures. Dedato's style for female characters is also hyper-idealized (e.g., Carol Danvers), with the Jim Lee-esque stylized anatomy combined with realistic penciling and shading making for an uncanny effect.
  • Alfred E. Newman of MAD fame. It's especially off-putting to see his creepy grin pasted onto other popular culture icons.
  • The caricatures from the 19th-century political satire magazine Puck can come across as this on account of the photo-realistic style.
  • Brian Bolland's art style is (intentionally) just plain creepy a lot of the time — while his character design is cartoony, it's also surreal and life-like. Naturally, he was the perfect choice for The Killing Joke.
  • Steve McNiven has penciled some of Marvel Comics' most well-known series and is a great artist, but there’s no denying his style tends to make characters (even heroes like Captain America) look like serial killers. This works well in gritty stories like Old Man Logan, but not so much in The Avengers.
  • Marvel Comics artist Greg Land's art is often described as having uncanny valley elements, as his style's a blend of standard comic designs and realistic Traced Artwork faces (as seen on his Ultimate Fantastic Four covers). His female characters tend to look creepily similar and often sexualized, and some of his art has been identified as traced from pornography.
  • Some of the earlier Winx Club comics have hideous panels, with an unhealthy side order of Off-Model.
  • Any attempt to make Archie Comics realistic looking falls into this. The artists infamously tried it out circa 2005 but got completely negative reactions.
  • As good as Sara Pichelli's work in Ultimate Spider-Man is, the artwork can sometimes fall into this with the extreme detail of the facial expressions.
  • Basil Wolverton's stories for Weird Mysteries are drawn with a disturbingly high level of detail for stylized designs. The effect is not unlike that of Alex Ross painting over a drawing done by an artist with a different style, as discussed above. Here's an example from a story titled "Robot Woman!" — which, ironically, has an In-Universe Uncanny Valley example as well.
  • Rob Liefeld gets ragged on a lot for his stylistic choices, but the problem sometimes goes beyond Off-Model and into this trope. For instance, there's Forearm, a four-armed strongman. His design could have been acceptable if not for the warped placement of limbs and features that makes him positively inhuman and grotesque. His left ear is both lopsided and appears to be coming out of his cheek, while his chin and jaw look more like a goiter. The placement of the lower left arm also suggests that its 'shoulder' sprouts out from below his ribcage and his upper right forearm appears to be the length of his fist due to bad placement. Still, just enough things look vaguely right for everything else to look terribly wrong. Liefeld's particularly got a lot of flack for his infamous drawing of Captain America, which is just completely unnatural and actually hard to look at for how awful it is — Cap's tiny head sitting on a massive, bloated torso, the fact the insignia is facing towards the reader despite the fact Cap's pecs are pointed ridiculously far forward. Some have argued that the shield is just hiding the curve of Cap's back, since otherwise he's an abomination; people have even removed Cap's clothes and showed his bone structure to showcase what a freak Liefeld has drawn.
  • Ken Penders' graphic novel series The Lara-Su Chronicles depicts his characters from Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) as realistic and grotesque-looking humanoid/animalistic creatures lacking the charm of their original Sonic style. Check it out. Quite a few fans were upset that their favorite characters were retconned from the comic for this unappealing style.
  • As with many Hanna-Barbera–based comics made by DC Comics, the reboots for Snagglepuss and The Flintstones decided to go for a more realistic design instead of the original Hanna-Barbera design. Unfortunately, though, they tried to make the art style look WAY too realistic, with hideously designed characters and expressionless faces on the characters. Because of this, many fans re-created the panels with their own style or even the original Hanna-Barbera style.
  • Similarly, when DC Comics decided to do crossovers of Looney Tunes characters with the main DC universe, this kicked in — particularly with the Lex Luthor/Porky Pig Special #1. Behold and shudder. (Lex's Unmoving Plaid suit isn't helping, either.)

Comic Strips 

  • This happens whenever Gary Larson (The Far Side) tries to emulate the style of more serious cartoons (to parody them, usually) that they get creepy.
  • The National Lampoon ran an article showcasing the 'real' people who were inspirations for newspaper comics — featuring lovingly rendered, realistic pictures of the subjects who were dead ringers for the likes of Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye, and the Nightmare Fuel that was Henry.
  • Started happening with some of the later For Better or for Worse strips. Lynn Johnston changed up her art style in certain panels to show Elizabeth looking more "attractive", particularly when she was trying to set her up with Anthony. The result absolutely backfired.

Literature 

  • The Adventures of Stefón Rudel has Dinochen. She's meant as a Plucky Comic Relief character and is actually one of the best characterized people in the book, but her description as resembling a small elephant walking upright with four arms nevertheless makes her look rather creepy.
  • Some of the pictures in Coraline — especially the picture of the Other Mother with a bug in her mouth.
  • Children's book illustrator Genevieve Godbout's depiction of realistically built humans with Black Bead Eyes and doll-like faces can look off to some.
  • The Jedi Apprentice books came out in the early 2000s. Rather than drawn art, they digitally altered Ewan McGregor's face to appear younger and stuck it on a shorter body whenever Obi-Wan appeared on the cover. This usually meant that his features were unnaturally smooth and doll-like, but if his expression was anything but neutral he often came out looking warped (the 10th book's cover gave him wrinkles).
  • Why is this cover for the Margaret Peterson Haddix book Turnabout so creepy, you may ask? If you didn't notice (some won't), half of the face is young when the other is old, effectively creeping us all out.
  • The Twilight Saga:
    • The description of the vampires' body and skin when one thinks about it. Their skin is beyond eerily pale and their bodies are as hard as rock or diamonds, with the corresponding temperature. Meaning, they are cold as ice to the touch. Their temperature never rises, so no matter how long they may be in a hot climate, they remain like ice.
    • Breaking Dawn has Renesmee. She's supposed to be seen as cute and endearing, but she's described as having teeth as soon as she's born and her unnaturally fast growth also has her extremities be "lean" and "almost adult-like" in length when she's only a few weeks old, making her appearance come across as that of Noodle People. Renesmee's also supposed to have an adult intelligence, but she still does very childish things like biting people and scream for attention — coupling that with the adult mind makes her actions feel very unsettling. Her creepiness is just one contributing factor to her status as The Scrappy, even among fans.
  • Paolo Bacigalupi apparently has a fetish for girls who fall into this category. The most blatant is the titular character of The Windup Girl, so called because she walks in a jerky manner like a wind-up toy. In-story, this is considered remarkably beautiful, but it's somewhat difficult to visualize how this could avoid falling into the Valley in real life. In-story, it sometimes does. It was also a deliberate design feature to make sure that the main character and others like her couldn't be mistaken for unmodified humans.

Live-Action TV 

  • The History Channel documentary Ancients Behaving Badly focuses on famous historical figures, forensically reconstructing their personalities (pathologies and all). Unfortunately, these segments always include a CGI rendering of the subject's face — which more often than not looks like an embalmed Gelfling that wants to dine on your tasty, tasty soul.
  • The first appearance of the Drakh in Babylon 5 were mouthless ghost-like creatures with glowing eyes that appeared distorted as though they were only partly in one place. They were later changed to be Rubber-Forehead Aliens with a reptilian look, and future appearances of the mouthless "soldier" caste Drakh were more rendered solid rather than distorted.
  • Barney & Friends: A common criticism from the show's Periphery Hatedom is how Barney's design (mainly his toothy grin and small but realistic looking eyes), combined with his always unfailingly chipper and upbeat personality and the series' overly saccharine tone (even by kid's show standards), come across as unnerving.
  • In the American version of Big Brother, at least once a season, often a veto later in the game, producers take pictures of the contestants (it can be any of them) and then morph them together into one picture. The houseguests in the competition then have to identify which two houseguests's facial features are represented in the picture. It can sometimes actually be a bit funny, such as in 10 where the one featuring Jerry (who was in his 70s) was morphed together with another houseguest significantly younger than him was described as a "Demon", or rather disturbing when you see Laura in 11's mouth look significantly bigger than the rest of the face.
  • The vehicle segments of the Swedish kids' show Bilakuten have anthropomorphic vehicles and trailers (and an anthropomorphic roller coaster in one episode). But look at their faces. They have human teeth. It just looks wrong.
  • For Tony's stag party on Coronation Street, they all wore "Tony" masks - flat unmoving faces with little cutout eyes peering out.
  • CSI: NY has an uncomfortably zombie-like woman who's lying comatose in a hospital due to Locked-In Syndrome in the first episode "Blink".
  • Doctor Who, as a show designed for scaring children often featuring humanoid monsters, has a very strong relationship with this trope.
    • The freakiest thing about the Cybermen might be that their hands are still human. The funniest thing about it? They only lacked gloves because the costume designer forgot to bring them to the set, so as is often the case with the early years of Who, one of the creepiest, if not the creepiest parts of their design came from a lack of budget and a genuine accident.
    • The horrible CGI Fake Shemp recreations of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton in "Dimensions in Time".
    • The animated episode "Dreamland" has a crude, stiff style of CG that makes it look unfinished and creepy.
    • Since the eponymous characters in "Space Babies" are played by actual babies, they had to digitally make it look like they were actually talking; which makes the movements of their mouths look ...off in certain shots, which is reminiscent of the "Baby Geniuses" franchise from the late-90s/early-00s.
  • In the live-action The Fairly Oddparents movie, Timmy's mom and dad are this. Despite being real people, they act a bit too cartoonish.
  • The Fuccons, known as Oh! Mikey in Japan, stars a cast of mannequins filmed at real-life locations. People unfamiliar with Yoshimasa Ishibashi's work are generally prone to be creeped out by the show, along with its combination of Surreal Humor and Black Comedy.
  • The George Lopez Show, of all shows, has this in George's childhood flashbacks, which take the head of adult George and paste it onto his childhood body. Naturally, it's because they actually "integrated" the head onto child George's body, rather than doing a cheap photoshop AFV-style.
  • Zaphod Beeblebrox's second head in the miniseries of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981). Sometimes it talks, but mostly it just sits there on his shoulder, motionless and eerily realistic. It was originally intended to be more animated than it ultimately was, but the prop head worked only intermittently, leaving it looking more like a shoulder-mounted pinata.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The Southland slaver warg is a dangerous beast and gets to kill several bit characters, but instead of appearing as this frightening mad warg, it comes out as a crazed chihuahua-poodle hybrid more than a wolf. The fans noted how narm-y it came out.
  • The Mandalorian: In Chapter 16 "The Rescue", Luke Skywalker returns in his prime and while most can agree it was an awesome moment, much like his sister Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One the CG recreation of Mark Hamill's face gave more than a few fans the heebie-jeebies. The Book of Boba Fett improves upon his face greatly to the extent that it feels like they've plucked Mark Hamill out of 1983 at times (which in of itself is kinda freaky) but some people were still creeped out by it, prehaps more due to a disconection between Luke's voice and face.
  • Max Headroom: The voice! The face! The eyes! The arrogance! (example) While Max is was played by a live actor, at the time this fact was underplayed in the media while the fiction that Max was an actual CG construct was maintained for a while, though this was dropped once the TV series started and the actor started to become known on his own merits.
  • Series three of Merlin features an elderly version of Merlin, portrayed by Colin Morgan in age make-up. Eerily realistic age make-up. The effect is... unnerving.
  • A program on the Military Channel about the Gettysburg Address features a mix of live actors, with a mostly-to-completely CGI Abraham Lincoln. The CGI Lincoln squarely falls into the Uncanny Valley.
  • Beginning with the third season, Modern Family has added an extremely unsettling, CGI smile to the face of Baby Lily in the opening credit montage.
  • The Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "It's a Tree" features pieces of wood and plastic talking through their lips.
  • For some, the Generic Man sim used to illustrate animal traits on The Most Extreme avoids this by being just slightly cartoonish, especially the goofy surprised looks whenever he gets overrun by something. In other cases, this cartoonish defiance from a normal human's appearance drives this into the deepest part of uncanny valley.
  • MythBusters:
    • Though not alive (or meant to be alive), Buster falls squarely into this category, considering all of the things Adam and Jamie have done to him to get a more "human" response out of him during tests, including giving him a "spine", "brain", and even breakable "bones" for testing injury. Special mention goes out to the "death balls" used for the Plywood Builder myth, which shatter upon a lethal impact, releasing stage blood. All used for effect, of course.
    • This also came up in a myth testing Latex Perfection. Even after getting the best masks money could buy, Adam and Jamie couldn't convincingly fool anybody unless they stood at a distance and didn't speak. Even complete strangers pointed out that upon closer inspection, something wasn't quite right about the faces they were looking at and they quickly deduced what was going on. Oddly enough, they apparently did fool someone: Jamie's dog. Because it did fool people at a decent distance (30 feet), even fellow MythBuster Grant Imahara, it was called "plausible".
  • "Floyd", the agent from "Department 44" in the NUMB3RS episode "Dreamland". He looked perfectly human, but his effect was rather like an android with a better-than-average speech program. The bouts of "invisible cell phone" had some viewers looking for the spinning blue ring, and the tendency toward Stealth Hi/Bye (Amita called it "materializing") just added to the weird factor. You would think that an agent with such a secretive group would want to blend more.
  • On the show River Monsters, host Jeremy Wade investigated some attacks on people in Papua New Guinea. One victim told him it felt like a person was biting him. Wade eventually catches the culprit, a fish called a pacu. Native to South America, the pacu were imported about fifteen years earlier and had seriously disrupted the ecosystem. Though related to piranhas, pacu were herbivores, and their flat teeth were normally used for crushing seeds and nuts. After being transplanted, though, they were unable to find enough of their regular diet and had expanded to meat-eating, including, apparently, humans. (They were far too small to eat a human whole, but could bite off chunks, including some... painful areas.) When Wade catches a big one, he pulls back its lips to reveal the teeth, which at that size were eerily human-looking.
  • She-Hulk: Attorney at Law naturally runs into this with its titular big green heroine *. The show does its best to have Shulkie seem authentic, being CG like her cousin is, whilst also trying to have her be attractive and human-like as she is in most comics (which is tricky to balance). The result is that while she does look alright at times, at other times, she really doesn't, falling squarely into this trope. The main issue is Jen's human looking face and hair simply feels like it's plastered onto a CG body that doesn't quite match, making for an unsettling appearance.
  • Sliders has a Big Bad in the form of the Kromaggs. The first time they appeared, they were just sufficiently not-quite-human to make them uncomfortable to look at. Subsequent returns of the Kromaggs make them look more human.
  • The de-aged little Eleven from Stranger Things Season 4 invoked this in certain viewers. While it is an undeniably good effect, there's certain moments in later episodes where her head and face come off as just a little too CG and therefore creepy. Although you can argue given the surreal and creepy tone of the flashbacks, it's kinda fitting.
  • The educational children's show Téléfrançais! has a rather... erm… uncanny puppet character named Pilote. If you're curious, start watching around 4:45 on the first episode.
  • For Halloween 2015, the anchors of Today did a group Peanuts cosplay, which fits this trope nicely due to how unrecognizable most of them looked with the costumes.
  • If you watched Toddlers & Tiaras, you'd know how wrong and "off" underaged children wearing makeup, sexy clothes, and spray-on tans are. Especially after seeing pictures of heavily photoshopped pictures. Those freakin' EYES!
  • Walking with Cavemen's human ancestors, who are actually People in Rubber Suits. Especially Australopithecus, because they are supposed to look weird, but their human proportions make them just slightly less weird than they should.
  • The Wiggles: The Wiggles puppets that were used early on had terrifying wide smiles and high voices. They were eventually removed due to parental complaints.

Music 

  • Radiohead:
  • Sparklehorse, in both the albums' artwork and the songs themselves, which often have a decaying, rummage sale-like quality that's very off, as if Linkous himself is a faulty clockwork puppet.
  • Aphex Twin's Windowlicker cover, which is his face photoshopped onto a model's body (here's the original for anyone curious). If you've seen the album cover enough times to be used to it, the real thing can look like Uncanny Valley.
  • The video for "Boom Boom Pow" by The Black Eyed Peas contains CGI motion capture sequences of the members singing which look unnerving as they are in the dark.
  • The cover for the album Something Like Human by the rock band Fuel contains a clear metal baby with blank eyes staring at us.
  • The album cover for Hybrid's Wide Angle has a human face that has been distorted with a liquify tool to be oddly wide. The back is color inverted, which makes it worse.
  • Daniel Amos' album Doppelgänger features photos of a department-store mannequin in the liner notes. In some of the pictures, he's wearing an eerily-realistic mask, then removes it to show that the too-human eyes are his.
  • News of the World by Queen, based on the cover of Astounding Science Fiction (October 1953), features a disturbing childlike giant robot holding bloodied, dead members of the band in his hand. This was terrifying for Seth MacFarlane from Family Guy, since the B-plot of one of the episodes revolved around Brian manipulating Stewie's fear of the cover.

Pinballs 

  • The pinball game White Water has a figure of Bigfoot, which (despite being designed after Dennis Nordman) looks a little... too eager to shove your balls away.
  • Another pinball machine, FunHouse (1990), has Rudy, a marionette-like character whose head is on the playfield as a talking plastic model. His eyes move too and are programmed to follow the ball around. He even says "I'm watching you..." when no one is playing. That being said, it's likely that his unsettling appearance is intentional, as he's a condescending jerkass, and the game encourages you to hit him with the ball.
  • The same technology for Rudy was used for two talking heads in Red & Ted's Road Show, but this time, Red and Ted are supposed to be friendly and inviting and even sing. Instead, they just come off like Rudy's equally creepy parents.

Puppet Shows 

  • Gerry Anderson's puppets for Thunderbirds and other shows are creepy - Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing a live-action parody are even creepier. Or funnier. However, due to the received wisdom that puppets (especially their faces) are only really creepy when they move, the fact they had no variation in facial expression and their dialogue was only animated by simple Mouth Flaps ironically prevented them from getting too unsettling.
    • The more realistic proportions the characters were given in Captain Scarlet also (again rather ironically) reduced the creepiness factor compared to the Thunderbirds' more babyish body proportions and facial features that often make them look like they've overdosed on botox.
    • Arguably reached new levels with the 80s series Terrahawks. The tried-and-tested "supermarionation" puppetry technique was swapped out for the newer "supermacromation", and these new puppets somehow managed to look even more disturbing than anything that Thunderbirds and its ilk could produce (they looked a lot more realistic than the older puppets, but there was still something distinctly "off" about them). See the intro for yourself here.
  • The Muppets mostly steer far clear of the valley because of their obviously-exaggerated proportions and colorful cartoonish looks. But every now and then one will be introduced that is just a little too human while not being human enough, and it'll creep people out.
    • The character of Digit from the "MuppeTelevision" segments of The Jim Henson Hour is a prime example, often topping lists of creepiest Muppets; the bug eyes that are not open fully and barely moving mouth while at the same time having an otherwise human facial proportion is just disturbing.
    • "MuppeTelevision" called ''Inner Tube TV was going to have a completely different Muppet cast with more human like designs and were scrapped because of this reason except for Digit ironically.
    • Chip as well, who is also from The Jim Henson Hour, tends to fall into this category. Much like Digit, he has huge bulging eyes but with an odd blinking mechanism that cause his pupils to occasionally flicker. This ended up being Played for Laughs in The Muppets (2015) as the rest of the Muppet characters also seem to find him unsettling or awkward.
    • On a similar note, The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss, proved that the Dr. Seuss characters don't exactly translate well to puppetry with their oversized upper lips and wide mouths. They also have a disturbing tendency to stare directly at the viewer, unintentionally or not.
    • Wear and tear on older puppets sometimes creates a creepy effect. When the Electric Mayhem's Sixth Ranger Lips was taken out of retirement in 2009, the studio was still using the same puppet for him built in 1980; the foam in his head was obviously wearing out, making his mouth gape wide open when not playing his trumpet. This, coupled with the discoloration and his eyes always seeming to be in a sad position ("/ \"), made him look like almost a corpse brought back to life. Eventually, filming for the music video "Kodachrome" ended with Lips completely falling apart (an interview with performer Steve Whitmire attributed this to the foam finally disintegrating), and a newer puppet was built which removed these elements and restored the character back to looking alive and well.
    • This may be part of the reason why after buying the franchise, Disney has placed a strict policy against allowing the Muppets to be seen in public when they're not being performed (though having the puppeteer be completely visible during a performance is accepted). Even if it's obvious that the characters in question are puppets, seeing them completely limp and not moving can be a bit unsettling, especially to younger kids. Even the retired Muppets shown on display in museum exhibits usually have armature wire put inside and are placed in some kind of pose, so it still looks like there's some life to them.
  • Sesame Street: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, characters have often been seen wearing masks. While it's understandable, since they want to teach kids about masks, the downside is that they put them on the puppet characters too. Since they can't emote with their eyes, if you can't see their mouths, they can't emote with their faces at all.
  • My Little Angels was an obscure Christian puppet show produced for the religious TV network EWTN, notable for its cast of ugly, cheaply-made hand puppets, many of which couldn't even fully open or close their mouths in a way that almost calls to mind cheap blow-up dolls.
  • "RealDoll" sex dolls. Film technicians who have worked with Real Dolls for movies report that handling them is creepily like handling corpses. Obviously, they, their flawless sexiness and their eternal sexual submission is massive fetish appeal and/or an alternative to prostitution / free-willed women for some, thus enabling the uncanny valley to be ignored a bit. Sankaku Complex appears a disturbing amount of times here.
  • Reborns. Baby dolls created to resemble the real thing as much as possible. Women also carry these things around and treat them like they're real babies. Warning: terrifying.
  • The Japanese tradition/hobby/fetish of kigurumi — cosplaying human and humanoid anime characters using masks and bodysuits — seems to back into the Uncanny Valley from the human side, due to the mad creepy effect the results sometimes have.
  • The mega-marionette that's made appearances at parades and festivals all over Europe has a limited head and facial animation that still manages to be creepily human in execution.
  • Jeff Dunham's first puppets fell right into the valley. The ones he uses now are heavily stylized and cartoony so they don't look as unrealistic and uncanny. However, Achmed Jr. who looks more realistic and also happens to have half his skin and muscle blown off falls head-first into the uncanny valley.
  • Spitting Image: British satirical puppet show from the late 1980s and early 1990s featuring hundreds of grotesque caricatures of celebrities. Some very puppetlike, others moving so realistically (even with blinking eyes) that it could become creepy.
    • In The '90s in Hungary when politics was something to be joked about instead of a joke itself, there was a parody show titled Uborka (Hungarian for cucumber) starring lifesized puppets formed as caricatures of politicians.
  • "Human doll cloning" was a Japanese fad which involved modeling a head from a human, printing it in 3D, and putting it on a poseable doll. The results are a very realistic human head on an otherwise visibly doll-like body.
  • Between uncanny valley and watching an episode of Friday the 13th series when he was a kid, is the reason why Channing Tatum has an admittedly bizarre fear of porcelain dolls.
  • The Amazing Christopher's "Dancing Queen" routine is pretty much the Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot of Uncanny Valley horrors. It's a spin on his usual routine (the "one-man dance crew") which is usually fairly creepy as is; in this case, he's dressed up as the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland (2010) and the dancing puppets are her card soldiers. But the cards have creepy moving mouths. And he's wearing an oversized puppet head as the Red Queen. And the puppet head has a ventriloquist dummy-like moving mouth of its own and unblinking eyes.
  • Some may find the disheveled and melted mannequins in "Survival Town" Nevada as something that fits into Uncanny Valley, given that it is a whole town filled with manikins. These manikins were used during nuclear bomb tests and were supposed to represent humans in that situation.
  • Disney Cruise Lines is set to feature a stage musical based on Frozen where the child versions of Elsa and Anna are to be portrayed by puppets that look like stereotypical Creepy Dolls with glassy eyes and hinged jaws, especially since they're 1:1 translations of the movie's stylized animated designs. Even worse is that it's implied that the teen versions of the sisters will be puppets as well, which is unnecessary since they can plausibly be portrayed by adult human actresses (as their adult versions are).
  • LazyTown. Specifically some of the human characters and their prosthetics. Not to mention that Robbie Rotten looks just a little too close to Bruce Campbell. Heck, is Robbie Rotten even human, or puppet? He looks so human, but human skin and hair aren't glossy like that!
  • The Noddy Shop: Most of the puppets in this show look cute and innocent, with them having either button eyes or being based on cute critters. However, the other puppets in the show aren't as nice. Johnny Crawfish, Island Princess and the Ruby Reds are some examples of this, with the first having weird-looking eyes, a mouth with teeth that always seems to be open and a huge chin, the second having eyes that might seem creepy and the concept of the latter (five singing lips that aren't attached to a face in a box).
  • Peppermint Park, an obscure kids' show, used some very creepy-looking human puppets, as seen here.
  • Rainbow, the British answer to Sesame Street, features two muppets who look perfectly alright...yet Bungle, a guy in a suit, falls right into the Uncanny Valley with his realistic movements and his unfortunate design.
  • The puppets in Donkey Hodie look perfectly fine, but the main character's plush collection, sans a stuffed elephant and The Amazing Radish, has such items as a red snake with strange eyes, a green monster with red eyes and teeth, and a doll with green curly hair that has blue eyes with no pupils.

Robots 

  • Kokoro, the new Actroid robot from Japan, is probably the best example for robots having reached the other side and now making it out of the valley. This hasn't been lost to the creators, with the word kokoro having the meaning of heart or soul, and probably being a direct allusion to the uncanny valley effect. A huge contrast to the early Actroid robots which were on the robot side of the valley but looking in (often compared to animatronics, which kept them out of the valley).
  • The Diego-san robot has a realistic human face... on an otherwise visibly robotic body.
  • This robot that looks like a fleshy armless mermaid.
  • While the Big Dog robot doesn't really resemble any living creature, it is the robot’s leg movements that seem a little unsettling (especially at around 1:12). One parody shows that it looks like two armless humans walking head to head.
  • The Geminoid. The most disturbing part is how perfect it is. It looks exactly like a real person right up until you realize it has no limbs and is fused to the desk.
  • Three disembodied android faces singing "Freedom" in robotic voices.
  • The way this robotic mouth moves its throat is creepy enough, but it's the demonic sounds that make it your nightmare for the next few days...
  • Tara the Android. Having made her debut in Fantastic Hey Hey Hey, she has returned to wander the earth spreading even more incomprehensible and terrifying videos. Watch anything on her Youtube channel and you might well die in seven days.
  • How about this robot designed to train dentistry students. Love doll type creepiness plus a stretched-open mouth and robotically-moving tongue...
  • Nadine, the robot receptionist. She looks almost exactly human, exhibits moods and emotions, and apparently even has her own personality. She's a friendly conversationalist and all, but most people still wouldn't want to have a desk next to hers.
  • Sophia falls into this - between the fact that she has no hair, never blinks, and holds her (often unusual) facial expressions for a lot longer than a real human would... it's hard to see her replacing any humans anytime soon. Despite this, Sophia has a fanbase and is often cited as an example of how falling into the valley doesn't make one automatically unlikable or unsympathetic. Her social media posts being cute and funny certainly help. Those who have learned to look past her "quirks" just see has as a Ridiculously Human Robot.
  • This was a serious problem for real-life cybernetics and prosthetics for a very long time. Flesh-colored artificial limbs just looked weird and fake. A minor but important revolution occurred when developers realized that people would prefer limbs that are obviously plastic or metal, as it looks more sci-fi.

Theme Parks 

  • The face makeup that the actors wore in Doug Live! did not age well in the decades following the last performance in 2001. From far away where the audience is seated, the effect isn't as bad, but in the closeup photos done for both behind-the-scenes photos and promotional material, it looks very unsettling. In some cases, such as Roger and Skeeter, the eyebrows are painted on instead of using the actor's natural brows, making the effect all the more eerie.
  • The mascot costumes of the Monica's Gang characters, as featured in live-action stage shows and Parque da Mônica, can be rather unsettling to look at. They feature skin tight suits that the actors wear, similar to animegao kigurumi costumes in Japan. The only difference is that the mascot heads are very big for the bodies of the costumes. And they can blink. The fact that the actors are able to talk while in the costumes unlike mascots in places such as the Disney Theme Parks doesn’t help either; the mouths of the heads don’t move, and the impressions that the actors do of the characters are lackluster at best. A redesign of the costumes in 2013 softened the features of the heads and reduced the sheen of the skin suits, but it doesn’t take the weirdness away.
  • When designing the "Shrek's Merry Fairy Tale Journey" ride for Motiongate Dubai, the designers tried to make the animatronics work on a limited budget. Their solution? Make the Framing Device a puppet show, transporting riders into a world filled with excessively creepy life-sized marionette animatronics with very conspicuous strings and (except for human female characters) equally conspicuous hinged jaws. The result is straight out of a pupaphobic's nightmare and turned out even more unsettling than if they had used limited "realistic" animatronics the whole way through. And for the cherry on top, there's a full-sized recreation of the "Welcome to DuLoc" Clockwork Chorus dolls' booth, presented out of context. Sweet dreams!

Toys 

  • The Big Comfy Couch generally averts this, as even though the main characters are clowns, the make-up used was minimal that it was easy to tell that they're humans playing the role. And then, there's this Loonette doll. With a voice chip inside. Sleep tight, kids!
  • These Reborn Baby dolls from MacPherson crafts. The photos alone are fine, because they just look like photos of babies. Having such a doll around would be like having a real baby that never moves at all, which is just horrific.
  • Baby Born dolls are deep in the Valley, with their empty staring eyes and their faces forever frozen in an unnatural pout.
  • Baby Jake is yet another weird show from The BBC, done in a similar style to Wonder Pets! (still photography combined with computer-generated animation). The show is creepy enough as is. And then there's the doll, which talks, no less.note 
  • Asian ball joint dolls. Ye gods, they can be spooky-looking — especially if you weren't expecting one. In particular, the Johnny Depp minimee — which resembles Johnny Depp, yes, but in a disturbingly static way. Just slightly out of proportion — and did we mention it's on about one third the scale?
  • Baby Laugh A-Lot. From the doll's creepy grin, its maniacal-sounding laugh, the creepy movements of the girls in the ad and what sounds like the narrator slowly descending into madness, everything about this commercial seems made to be creepy.
  • The Princess Rosella Karaoke Styling Head (based on Barbie as the Island Princess) is kind of in the Valley as-is. When someone turns it into a SkeleBot 9000, it may or may not have exited the Valley for you, but good lord preserve us anyway.
  • Hot Toys, a Hong Kong-based company specialising in 12 inch collectible action figures, have become famous for the astounding likenesses they produce. Since they mostly make figures licensed from films, actors such as Brad Pitt, Mickey Rourke, Scarlett Johannson and Arnold Schwarzenneger have become immortalised as Hot Toys figures. Their most creepy products are arguably those of the Joker, as played by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Check it out and tell me you're not even mildly disturbed. A big part of this is the "Parallel Eyeball Rolling System", which allows the figures' eyeballs to move. Brr. Most of the time however, Hot Toys' work is more awesome than creepy, thankfully.
  • Teddy Ruxpin is notorious for this. It's not the character design that pushed the toy into the valley though. The feature that pushed the toy into the uncanny valley here is how his mouth moved combined with his static facial expression. In other words, an inactive Teddy Ruxpin is fine. A working one isn't.
  • Baby Say 'N See from Mattel in 1965. According to Mike Mozart's review of the doll, she was possibly the inspiration for Chucky. Some of the things she said would simply exacerbate the creepiness.

    "I can see in the dark. Can you?

    "My eyes are magic. I can see through anything."

    "Wouldn't it be fun if you were a doll like me?"

  • The My Little Pony: Equestria Girls prototype dolls look jarringly different from in the actual movie, and from the show it was spun off from. The problem lies in the fact that the dolls attempt to look "sexy" with mascara, lipstick and face paint, while the characters in the animated movie lack the makeup and retain at least some of the cuteness of their equine counterparts. The use of unnatural skin colors such as bright purple and blue also add to the "wrongness" of the dolls.
  • Ty Beanie Ballz can be absolutely disturbing, thanks to their overly large eyes and round bodies.
  • My Little Pony (G3).5 retooled the G3 ponies into hideously deformed animesque creatures that barely resemble ponies at all.
  • For some reason, somebody thought it was a good idea to make a talking doll of Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone. It has a soft cloth body but a hard plastic head, which don't mix well and make his creepy facial expression even worse. And with age, the doll's voicebox becomes distorted, making his lines sound demonic. See Stuart Ashen be creeped out by it here
  • Bratz dolls can be this once you realize how distorted their faces and bodies are.
  • A Belle doll based on Beauty and the Beast (2017) quickly gained notoriety for being creepy as hell — essentially Emma Watson's photorealistic head, with unearthly pale skin, freckles that look more like a skin condition more than anything, and an absolutely gigantic forehead, pasted on top of a disproportionately small body. For a character referred to in the title as a "Beauty" and who is played by a very pretty actor, they could have done a lot better.
  • This Beast Boy toy from Teen Titans Go! seems to be cute, until you look at the eyes, which are supposed to change emotion but wind up being creepy-looking ones.
  • From the anime Kodocha, we have a Syabecot in the likeness of Sana. Because it can talk, the mouth of the doll is open, making for a rather creepy face for what could have been a cute doll.
  • This Mary Ingalls doll based on Little House on the Prairie. Even some doll collectors find the face rather upsetting, to say the least.
  • Police x Warrior LovePatraina, a tokusatsu series, has a fairy mascot named Lovepyoko that was turned into a toy. While promotional images promised a cute-looking toy, some were understandably shocked when the actual product wound up looking like this.
  • As they are based on inhuman robots, you would expect that the Transformers would be exempt from this effect. As it turns out, it's still possible to produce a few deeply unsettling toys even when the toys in question are robots. Wheelie's mixture of scraggly misshapen limbs, bug eyes, and gap teeth give the unpleasant feeling of something organic doing a terrible job of trying to be a robot in turn doing a terrible job of trying to be a toy car. Dead End's gangly proportions are not an issue, but what is a problem is the mixture of organic lower jaw full of irregular teeth paired with a head and face that bears a few structural resemblances to a rodent skull. The too-organic nature of his design is reflected in his fictional appearances, which afflict him with a sort of robotic vampirism. This means the effect is actually intentional—he is meant to cause the unease one would feel upon seeing something subtly inhuman in real life.
  • This Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Sing-A-Ma-Jig looks rather creepy, as not only does it have an unusual mouth, said mouth displays odd-looking teeth when it's open.
  • The L.O.L. Surprise! OMG dolls are meant to be cool teenage girls with some pastel colors, but have large eyes and a Super-Deformed look not unlike their baby counterparts, which results in something unnerving to say the least.
  • Edison's Phonograph Doll, which was one of the earliest commercially released talking dolls, are a stuff of nightmares both today and when they were first released in the 1890s. As to whether digitising the wax records of the dolls were a good thing or not is everyone's guess.

Web Animation 

  • One of the most disturbing channels on Youtube is called "Hey Kids!" which releases an endless stream of "Finger Family" songs with off-model CG, weird, unmoving 2D cells of animation, and an absolutely horrifying Author Avatar in that weird porcelain-doll type of creature that heads the channel with a weird Russian/Persian accent. The channel was later taken down after violating Terms of Service, not to mention the videos that were later uploaded onto the channel...
  • A lot of things made with the MikuMikuDance software straddles the line between awesome and awesomely disturbing. What's especially fun is that the software can be used to make a model of just about anything. Case in point: this, a such video featuring Seto Kaiba. And if you're feeling especially brave, here's the same model, dancing to Black Rock Shooter. The creator even apologizes that she couldn't get the model's eyes to stop rolling back into its skull. Besides the eyes, the only creepy thing is that he is singing with a girl's voice.
  • For a long time in Red vs. Blue, the only character whose face we saw was Vic, who was an image capture from the first Halo game. Acceptable enough as he never looked particularly real. Then along comes Reconstruction which gives us the Councilor. A much, much more realistic looking character (same effect, only they used an image from a newer game and used more advanced effects when making his mouth move) but there's still something about the way his face stays alarmingly still while his features are moving... Director Church isn't nearly as bad, but they hardly ever show his entire face, and he does show more movement in his emotions. The Councilor, on the other hand, seems to be this way intentionally, with his deadpan voice and methodical speech pattern.
  • This Zelda Fan Film contains the perfect storm of both Uncanny Valley and Off-Model, with Link looking like he had a bad head injury and Ganondorf looking shiny. The animation itself, while decently choreographed, is jerky and unnatural, and the awful lighting makes things even worse. Its sequels show little improvement, and the teaser for the next one features Fi (who already lacked proper eyes) with a misshapen head and her "Hair Hat" looking too realistic, and shots of horseback-riding that resembles someone riding a mechanical bull.
  • This animator doesn't want her pizza to burn. Of note is at 1:40-1:50, where she does the worst animation of lip-licking you'll ever see.

Webcomics 

  • While the Ctrl+Alt+Del characters look fine on paper, they become horrible, twisting abominations when animated.
  • Suicide for Hire is a rare subversion of the logic behind Furries Are Easier to Draw. There's just something not right about the character faces...
  • The main female lead in Komos & Goldie is this, due to not only looking like a naked golden human woman, but she's also given nipples.
  • One of the many criticisms of Assigned Male is that all the preteen characters look more like deformed toddlers, giving most of the strips an off-putting vibe.
  • Miss Guillotine: Hailey's design, especially as Illuminaty Beauty, is rather unnerving. Her piercing red eyes and sharp angles just make her supposed beauty appear inhuman, to the point she seems more like an insect than a person. It doesn't help that her current appearance was actually the result of extensive plastic surgery which somehow made her several inches taller and changed the shape of her eyes. It's honestly no wonder people began to appreciate Kayla's beauty over her's, because Kayla's was not only natural but less angular and severe than Hailey's.

Web Original 

  • Cake Wrecks: Most of the attempts at making human-shaped cakes featured on Cake Wrecks. The infamous meatloaf baby is particularly horrifying. Or there is one cake shaped like human foot with sick-looking brown-yellowish crooked toe... It's advisable to have a bucket by yourself, or run to the bathroom.
  • Cessa Lafaliqa is an Indonesian artist with a semi-realistic, semi-animesque drawing style who became popular on Twitter (warning: NSFW artwork) thanks to his original character Arung, an extremely buff yet still cute dark-skinned girl. The contrast between Arung's lovingly detailed musculature, almost photo-realistic rendering of skin, sweat and reflections, and Arung's simplified and cutesy manga-style face is disturbing to some, and someone even basically told them so, making the artist directly mention "uncanny valley" in their answer.
  • Cracked: It has a list of some real-world androids that dwell in the darkest depths of the Uncanny Valley. They even mention the trope by name. In a similar vein - 5 Real Robots Built to Love you to Death. The final example is completely deliberate and was built to study the Uncanny Valley effect.
  • DeviantArt: DeviantArt users sometimes create 'bases', where one or more templates are posed in some way and can be easily modified by other users. That's nice... unless you draw it like this. Long story short, the 'templates' are deformed beyond anatomical reason, and have been the subject of much parody.
  • Evie really takes the cake. She's an A.I. that responds to what is typed into an empty space, and makes certain facial expressions depending on her mood. Not only are facial movements uncanny, her responses are almost always accurate. If her voice was any more realistic... Also, if you threaten to kill her, guess what happens...
  • Photoshop Disasters features numerous examples of this. Strange, unnatural proportions; people with too many or too few limbs; misshapen body parts and so on and so forth.
  • This Sporcle picture quiz, which involves guessing the identity of celebrities whose photos have been manipulated so that they have manga-style eyes. One of the comments even proclaimed, "Well, I'm going to have nightmares."
  • The Escher Girls blog.
    • "This is a blog for pictures of female characters in impossible or ridiculous poses or with disturbing anatomy because the artists need to show teh sexy."

      Okay. Audience participation! Let’s do a little experiment. 1) Lie down on your side. 2) Bend your torso up 90 degrees. 3) Call the paramedics.

    • The thing is that a lot of the posts use an otherwise realistic art-style. So ignoring what's realistic in favor of what's sexy probably isn't a good idea. However most of the poses aren't creepy so much as laughably bad. They still act as Fetish Retardant, though.
  • Squicky Game Art blog. "...SGA brings relief from an onslaught of broken spines and boob windows."
  • Virtual Eternity, a site where you can create your own "Intellitar" (intelligent avatar) using your photograph, voice, and even bits of your personally. However, the result is not exactly... natural. Click on the Intellitar Galleries or Intellitar Guide and you'll understand... *shudder*
  • Neopets: Topsi is a Cybunny (a rabbit-like Neopet) that hosts the Festival of Neggs (the website's equivalent to Easter). He's a happy, friendly fellow who loves to hide Neggs, and his appearance does not normally fall under this trope. However, his appearance in the 2021 festival is quite different. He's much scruffier in appearance, with visible scratched on his face and arms, unkempt hair and a small mouth in a rather odd expression. But the scariest part is his eyes. His eyes are normally large, but now one eye appears to be much bigger than the other. In addition, his irises are bright pink with tiny black pupils, and to top it off, he appears to be looking right at the viewer.
  • AI generated images in general could fall into this and Uncanny Valley: they have a lot of lifelike photos of things that feel so convincing, but if you take one close look at them, and they feel so unnerving and wrong. In particular, many people in AI photos with 6 or 4 fingered hands, not comprehending words, backgrounds not being correct, bodies having the wrong proportions, and so on.
    • One of the earlier websites using generative technology This Person Does Not Exist, (created at the end of 2018) which has human mugshots that very much fall into the trope, looking very convincing but at the same time very off. Oh, there are also some faces that have some errors as well, looking half-formed as a result. Granted, the AI does improve over time, generating increasingly convincing human mugshots as of 2021, but sometimes it is prone to generate misshapen faces as background images due to the AI focus on single-person mugshot.
    • Then there's This Waifu Does Not Exist and This Anime Does Not Exist Now, you may ask, how could a bunch of anime girls be so scary? Well, the truth is that they AREN'T...until you stay there for a bit and see half-formed faces that look very horrifying. The other goof-ups (and there are MANY goof-ups) aren't much better, some looking incredibly Off-Model and disproportioned, some lack basic facial features like pupils or a mouth, some look like they're MELTING, while others look like the paper they're on or even their flesh is cracking apart. The latter even has "creativity levels" that can seriously deform the character's appearance.
    • This Car Does Not Exist applies this to automobiles, and despite cars aren't living things, the depicted AI-generated cars are arguably even worse, with most of the generated images looking like poorly-made imitations, or cut-and-shut vehicles.

Web Videos 


Japan's Creepiest Beauty Trend

YouTuber akidearest explains why this beauty trend is not only not attractive but it also screams insecurity and straight looks terrifying.

Example of:
Manipulative Editing