If collodi had written about realdolls he wouldn't have finished his life in poverty...

Do you actually get to read Pinocchio in the States? I know it's very popular around the world, and it would be interesting to know what kids thought of it around the world and in different times.

Realdolls are creepy and people loving them are scaring me. One who fantasizes of having such a complete control over a partner sounds a bit (over the) Borderline.

M

Mario, I don't know if kids these days actually read the original version of Pinocchio. I read it as a kid -- one of my aunts gave me a copy. It's a super, super, *super*-weird book, and I mean that in a good way. I hope the kids today *do* read it, because it's much stranger than the sanitized crap you find on children's bookshelves today.

Reminds me of the weird scene at the end of Fellini's Casanova where he tenderly dances away with his new, clockwork love, the truest affection he's ever known (forgive me if I'm a bit fuzzy on the details - I haven't seen it since my precocious college days).

And by precocious I really mean "puttin on airs."

I see a parallel here between the creepiness of these near life-like dolls and the simulacra of humans in video games (mentioned before on this blog). My theory is that animals must have keen senses for monitoring the condition of others within their group. Much the same way that dogs, as has been recently discovered, can smell if someone has cancer, we use visual cues for similar purposes. It is important to know how others are doing. It is not difficult to tell either. Usually it takes a mere glance. When we look at these dolls, we know on one level that we are looking at, well, dolls, but because of their verisimilitude to an actual person, combined with the fact that they don't quite look like or act like a living person, our brains tell us that something is wrong...perhaps terribly wrong. I'm not sure whether it would be more appropriate to call these dolls life-like, or dead-like.

Slimbolala, heh. I've never seen Casanova -- that sounds really wild!

Yes, Daniel, that's precisely it. They're right down there in the Uncanny Valley.

This... makes me feel like a naive, scared virgin. And THAT, my friend, is a feat. Whole fake people? Lord, humans are messed up.

Actually, the problem is not that they look too life-like, it is mostly that they don't *move*.
Anyone can tell in an instant if the person they are looking at is alive or dead, and these dolls look, well, dead.
We all make very small movements constantly. These movements are vitally necessary for climbing out of the The Uncanny Valley. It is a level of animation detail that has yet to be mastered.

Yes, precisely -- it's the movement that we can always detect as "off". That's why Hollywood may eventually climb out of the Valley -- because film animators can lavish months of attention on making a few seconds of a facial closeup look "just right" the video-game people are probably permanently screwed: It's much, much harder for an on-the-fly animation engine to capture these nuances.