Accepted, pre-published copy for University Repository Richard Hetherington and Rachel McRae. Make-Believing Animated Films Featuring Digital Humans: A Qualitative Inquiry Using Online Sources. animation: an interdisciplinary journal Vol. 12, Issue 2, pp. xx-xx. Copyright © 2017 (SAGE Publishing). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. Corresponding author: Richard Hetherington, School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University, 10 Colinton Road, EH10 5DT, UK. Email:
[email protected] Make-Believing Animated Films Featuring Digital Humans: A Qualitative Inquiry Using Online Sources Richard Hetherington and Rachel McRae School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University, UK Abstract A qualitative inquiry of reviews of films featuring digital humanlike characters was performed by sampling user comments from three online reviewer aggregator sites: the Internet Movie Database, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The movies chosen for analysis were: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), The Polar Express (2004), and Beowulf (2007), all produced using CGI animation, together with A Scanner Darkly (2006a) whose visuals are depicted by rotoscoping using Bob Sabiston’s Rotoshop software. Our analysis identified individual differences in the viewing experience, particularly in relation to the uncertain ontology of the humanlike characters created using CGI (CGI-Humans). We found examples of reviews indicating an inability to distinguish between real and CGI-Human actors, observations of characters transiently exhibiting realism before returning to their artifice, and of characters being viewed as eerie (analogous to the uncanny valley) thus illustrating a complex and dynamic response to this phenomenon. In some situations character uncanniness was related to the presence of an atypical feature such as movement of the eyes.