Brain Handles

Jay Jay the Jet Plane is the animated star of of a PBS kiddie show bearing his name. And "Jay Jay the Jet Plane and the Uncanny Valley" might sound like the title of one of his adventures. But the Uncanny Valley isn't a place. It's a theory that has to do with why some human-like characters are cute or attractive and others are downright creepy... like Jay Jay.

It's not unusual in PBS kiddie shows for vehicles to have faces. The trains on "Thomas the Tank Engine And Friends" have faces as do the construction vehicles on "Bob the Builder". Luckily these faces are kept cartoony enough to avoid the Uncanny Valley. The faces of the planes and other vehicles on "Jay Jay the Jet Plane" get a little too close to the precipice and often slide down inside (watch some Jay Jay video).

By now, you're asking yourself, "what exactly is the Uncanny Valley?" Let me explain. No, that would take too long. Let me sum-up.

Basically, the Uncanny valley is that spot where a robot, puppet, or computer animation is too much like a person to avoid being compared to one, but not enough like a person to compare favorably.You see the human qualities, and instead of being endearing (like say a talking teddy bear), they're just creepy because it feels like watching a zombie... someone's animated the corpse, but they just don't have enough control over the body for it to really seem alive.

(And yes, the talking teddy bear that followed Haley Joel Osment around in AI was borderline creepy).

This is the way I feel about the faces on the vehicles on "Jay Jay the Jet Plane". They're human enough to get into the Uncanny Valley, but so cheaply/poorly animated that they fail to reach the other side. They dip into that zone of revulsion where their jerky movements, the seams that sometimes show during those movements, and the silly voices all combine to produce an effect that leaves cute puppet/cartoon on the runway and flies the zombie skies.

My two year old LOVES airplanes. We live near Paine Field (a small private airport next to the Everett, WA Boeing plant) and have small planes flying overhead all day. His day care is even closer, and thus we often see planes coming in for a landing as we drive home in the early evening. If a plane flies over, he's the first to shout "airplane" and point to it, tracking it through the sky at the end of his finger. He also LOVES "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends". If we wanted to use the TV as an electronic babysitter, all we'd need to do is put some Thomas on the DVD/DVR on a loop.

Yet, for some reason (I wonder why), "Jay Jay the Jet Plane" makes him squirm. Now it could be that "Thomas..." is much more like a moving storybook with a narrator telling the story and doing all the voices, while "Jay Jay..." has more involved plots with the characters interacting with each other directly. But he also enjoys "Bob the Builder" which has those elements.

While he's too young to express it, I think he squirms while watching "Jay Jay the Jet Plane" for the same reason I do... he's noticing the Uncanny Valley, how the faces of the planes have musculature and skin tone like the faces of people, but they just don't seem to move quite right, and it makes him uncomfortable. I'm also made uncomfortable by the bad blue screen integration of the few actual humans, but that's just my allergy to low production values.

The Uncanny Valley is where anthropomorphic characters become abominations. The people behind Jay Jay need to either pull things back and make it more cartoony or plough forward and improve their animation, because right now they're in a bad place between "too human" and "not human enough" where their characters are creepy instead of cute.