Thats Entertainment

I came across a web site this morning that I at first thought was a parody. It offered a view of Star Wars 'as you'd never seen it before'. How could they possibly do that, I wondered. I knew that Lucas had recut parts of the original, but this site was obviously displaying something that was animation. Why would I want to see that? Nevertheless, I watched their trailer -- it turned out to be for The Clone Wars; I'm not enough of a Star Wars fan to know whether that was an actual movie or simply a reference that was made in the original series -- and to my surprise, it wasn't bad. More directly, it wasn't cartoonish. The characters were well drawn (the aliens looked more 'real' than the humans), and the plot, insofar as they showed it, was believable. Could I see myself paying real money to see this in a theater? Well... perhaps. ( In a good theater, with comfort and style. Part of the package of the experience is where and how you see it; if I'm giving up something in the characterization, I think I'd want payback in the environment. At least, I would now. Who knows what I'd want, after this kind of entertainment became routine?)

It got me to thinking a little bit about the nature of entertainment. I am not up on what the prevailing attitudes were when television first became popular, but I seem to recall reading that many people felt it couldn't possibly work; after all, audiences were used to live performances, with live actors who were right there in front of you. How could this little box with an imperfect image possibly compete? Of course, based on those criteria, it couldn't -- but when you factored in the idea of delivery of the entertainment to your home, at your convenience, it became more believable. So when I think of an animated entertainment as a competition with live actors, I think 'who would want to see that?' But when I think of it as the opportunity to see entertainment, period, without comparison to a different style of delivery -- then it becomes more plausible to me.

Years ago, I read science fiction novels that postulated a time when the 'people' in these films wouldn't be real. Some of the novels postulated that the 'people' would look real, but not be; others said that they'd look 'real enough'. None of them thought about the idea of cartoonish animation as a possibility, let alone the concept of the 'uncanny valley' which roboticists have come across -- the idea that there is a point where a mechanical face looks so real, without being totally believable, that it gives you the shivers; its as if you're watching an animated dead person. And so they have to back off, just a bit, so that its obvious that this is a fake person (Oh, look how real it looks). I find this to be an interesting possibility, and I wonder if the two fields will merge to deliver entertainment thats entirely done via technology, no visible humans involved.

I wonder: would we give it a special name?