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In the decades-long quest to perfect animated hair, the makers of Merida's wild locks in Pixar's Brave have gotten one step closer to perfection. Hair has presented a particular problem for animators -- a problem that CGI animation has improved upon but not ameliorated. The way locks move can make a character look just the right amount of real. Though, there is such a thing as too real, where we fall into the Uncanny Valley, a land with creepy too-human characters that mess with our minds. But, even with some slips in the wrong direction, we have seen a marked improvement in hair animation, with this ginger's wild locks presenting a new level of hair animation.
Let's take a look at how far we've come:
Pre-CGI hair
Pre-Pixar and the modern CGI era, animation didn't get hair right because the technology wasn't there. "As any animator will tell you, the hardest thing to accurately render is the millions of tiny strands of hair on a human head," Janelle Brown wrote in Spin back in August 2001. Brown's story was about Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which was at the cutting edge of CGI-rendered actors. Ariel of Little Mermaid fame, for example, was supposed to have curly hair, but the technology wouldn't allow it, according to Wired's Rachel Gross. So instead, we got that flowy red blob, which was more of a singular mass than individual strands of hair. We wouldn't call that curly. Maybe wavy? Flouncy?