Sin City
Tezuka's Metropolis
T H E U N C A N N Y V A L L E Y
In the process of plot development, the face taps into the feelings of the uncanny. Sin City is a neo-noir film that uses faces in a very dramatic way. The characters and the settings are rendered to be as similar as possible to Frank Miller’s original comic. The film’s success in doing so creates faces that come to life from Miller’s illustrated imagination. Some of the characters are distortions of human faces. The Yellow Bastard, for example, would fall into the range of Masahiro Mori’s pseudoscientific notion of the uncanny valley. He is technically human, yet in appearance he only rates at the level of the “almost human”. The Yellow Bastard’s face is altogether revolting and dysmorphic. This is precisely what brings out the unnatural characteristics, and the cause of feelings of detachment and horror for an audience, further amplified by the selective use of the sickly yellow hue.
Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis perhaps more closely reflects Mori’s hypothesis. Tima is an android, built by Dr. Laughton, to become Duke Red’s super weapon of world domination. Before her final completion, Dr. Laughton’s lab is destroyed. Tima awakens, but without comprehension of her superhuman being. She appears to be a normal girl, and the audience becomes empathic to her as a human. These evoked feelings of empathy are perhaps what cause the drop to the uncanny valley to be ever greater, as the innocent and helpless Tima transforms into an indomitable and monstrous tool of destruction. Her human-like flesh tears away from her face to unveil the shocking coldness of steel. Within a short instant, the film pushes the audience’s perception of Tima from the point of human familiarity into the depths of the uncanny valley. There seems to be nothing left of Tima that relates to who she was before, until the very end, when Kenichi attempts to rescue her, and she asks, “Who…am…I?” The film effectively uses the face to conjure these quick instances of change in sentiments, creating the unexpected by first following cultural presumptions.