"Little Brown Fox" wrote:I don't really like how Atom looks in Pluto, though. And besides, if someone tried building him to look more human like that, he'd be creepy-looking- Uncanny Valley, remember? Things that don't look exactly like humans (like the Leo robot, for instance) tend to be cuter (and far less creepy).
I had to google for Uncanny Valley. I had read about that before, it was one of the reasons some people were turned off by the movie "Polar Express". The characters in that were certainly in the "valley" somewhere, especially if you saw the movie in 3D (I did, but I did get used to the effect by the middle of the film). Disney's Audio-Animatrons at the theme park probably fall into the valley too, but the noises their solenoids make spoil the effect and raise them out of the valley after a while.
Getting back to the manga stories, as I said, Tezuka had us believe that the human characters in the story couldn't tell that some robots (in some cases Atom) were NOT human beings. In other cases Atom was known to be a robot (by fame at least). In Pluto, the robots were drawn enough like humans so the readers of the story could see what the characters saw.
I won't argue about real life robots falling into the 'valley', because we are not there yet with our technology. Star-Trek's data is close to the valley at times, the Borg are Zombie enough to be right at the bottom, but that actually takes them out of the valley too.
As far as Simon goes, he's 'cute' enough not to be a problem, and if I were working on that project he'd have been 'cloned' as Atom. QED.
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