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I think I know just what you are talking about, because I get weirded out by 1960's era posters of disco kids, with pencil thin bodies and huge heads with wide, staring pleading eyes. They give me the willies inside. I couldn't figure it out for a long time. (This was long before modern anime, with the huge Bambi-eyes.) But here is what I came up with.

I think it has to do with the fact that when we see something that we can't quite tell whether it is human or not, we have an instinctive sense of horror and revulsion. Bear with me while I explain.

Imagine making a series of dolls, the first ones are crude images, the later ones become more and more lifelike. Then we add a voice box with a recording, now we have a doll that can drink, cry, sleep and wet. Suppose we go on to put a computer in the doll and it can move more realistically, has a wide variety of things it can say and do. We can still recognize it as a doll.

Say someone makes a doll that we can't quite tell whether it is a doll or alive. We would have to watch its behavior and see if it started to do weird things to tell the difference. (I'm assuming we're not allowed to take X-rays or anything like that.)

People who have studied CGI, to make realistic characters for movies, and people who are trying to make lifelike robots that can interact with people run into this problem. The human face is very flexible and can make a wide range of emotional expressions. In fact, when we run into someone whose face is paralyzed by a stroke and cannot make those expressions, or someone whose conscience is paralyzed by schizophrenia and does not make those expressions (or makes inappropriate ones) that is how we recognize there is something 'wrong' with those people.

A likeness that resembles a human being is emotionally acceptible to us up to the point where it resembles a human so much we are not sure whether it is really human or not, THEN we have an emotional reaction against it.

In medieval times, they had legends about creatures that were half-man and half-animal... mermaids, satyrs, centaurs, etc. What made them horrible...? Think of the beautiful mermaid, luring lonely sailors on the sea until they got a look below the surface and realized it wasn't a real human woman after all, but something luring them to their doom. That's the idea.

Betty Boop had a really distorted head. She's cute, but if a person's head was actually like that, it would be a horrible birth defect and theyir brain would be so squished they might have a single-digit IQ and have to wear diapers all their life. Other characters, like Mickey have disproportionately large heads. You may just have a very good inborn sense of natural proportions. Do you draw or sketch? You might want to try taking some lessons. You might be good at it.

Check the other toons that bother you to see if they have similar characteristics.

Here's a book that talks about emotional expression that you may find interesting: Emotions Revealed, by Paul Ekman. He is a psychologist and one of th epeople who invented a special technique the FBI uses to detect when people are lying by their involuntary emotional expressions.

There was also an article in Popular Science Magazine on the robot face phenomenon. Try searching on the term 'uncanny valley', in connection with robots, and you may find more.

2 JAN 08, 1454 hrs, GMT.

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