Years ago, I watched Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), supposedly the first ‘photorealistic’ computer-animated feature film. I remember exactly zero percent of the plot. My memories were overwhelmed by the lead character’s 60,000 individual strands of hair forming a hypnotic CGI shampoo commercial atop her head.

The one thing I remember clearly is an easter egg tucked away on the DVD that features the entire cast of the movie doing the dance from Michael’s Jackson’s “Thriller”. And it’s as creepy as hell. Watch:

I was reminded of this by writing about the anthropomorphic mutants living in M&M’s World, but also when putting together a piece on art that features forced dancing as punishment. It’s something seen in everything from the classical ballet to “Once More With Feeling”, the infamous musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Sometimes – as in the original Brothers Grimm telling of Snow White – it’s the kind of torture that wouldn’t be out of place in the next Saw sequel. The queen’s feet are placed into red-hot iron clogs until she ‘dances’ herself to an agonising death.

In other examples – such as Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes or the ballet Giselle – it’s forced dancing through magical possession. That’s somehow even worse. Moving against your will taps into the fear inherent in the cartesian split: that your body is not your own. Your brain might be screaming commands, but your limbs aren’t listening. It means the choice of “Thriller” here is more than just novelty. When the Final Fantasy characters are animated without individuality, they become zombies – corpses, jerked around on invisible strings.

Despite the fact that the BBC ran a hilariously panicky story on how human actors could quickly find themselves replaced by these ‘synthetic actors’, the stars of Final Fantasy are never exactly convincing. So why is watching them dance like Jackson – with soulless expressions and in perfectly calibrated clockwork time – so disquieting?

Chalk it up to the peculiar narcissism of human beings. Remember the rumbles of controversy about the Oscar-winning documentary March of the Penguins attributing comforting human motivations to its feathered stars? (The New York Times quipped in an articled called “Penguin Family Values” that it “…may be fun to find a moral lesson in that enthralling penguin movie, but anthropomorphism, like after-shave, is best used sparingly.”)

In his book on the mechanics of sequential art, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud says that we’ll often see anything with two dots and a line as a human face – and we’ll be more invested in it, too, because of the extra imaginative work we’ve had to do to turn the abstract into the familiar. It’s one reason why comic art is so involving; it’s also why everyone with a beating heart loves the socks-with-eyes that are the Muppets. We can’t help it. We’ll anthropomorphise anything we can get our human eyeballs on, and we’ll certainly attribute souls to stiff and charismaless Final Fantasy stars. McCloud goes on to say:

We humans are a self-centered race.

We see ourselves in everything.

We assign identities and emotions where none exist.

And we make the world over in our image.

We’re unable comprehend how anything could be, or think, or feel differently than us. Sure, it’s narcissism – but at least its side-effect is sometimes random excesses of empathy.