Pickled Pixels

Between cartoons produced by hand or by computer, I prefer the old school. Though more accurate, computer characters look freakish; their skin looks flat, the facial expressions hollow and movements stiff.

Strangely, people respond similarly to robots. The closer an android resembles a human, the more it looks like "an animated corpse." Slate writer Clive Thompson makes a cool analogy between that phenomenon and the creepiness of computer generated people. Reading someone's face is a survival skill carefully refined through evolution. So even if a computer graphic is 99% lifelike, we will always notice that 1%.