[pretoriusB]

>The reason action packed scenes and panning scenery all retain their authenticity is these scenes are unfamiliar to us. I’ve never encountered a battlefield of orcs, and I’ve never flown across the landscape hugging the ground in a helicopter. We have no prior experience which tells what these scenarios should look like.

That's not exactly what the "uncanny valley" theory says, though.

It's about realistic vs cartoony versions of things, not about familiar vs unfamiliar things.

[baddox]

Well, the uncanny valley does rely on the adaptation of human brains to quickly judge familiar things. Human faces are the most obvious and common example, because the human brain and visual system has unsurprisingly adapted to be extremely fast and aggressive at recognizing facial features. The effect will never be as strong with something like, say, the face of an aardvark, because everyone sort of knows what aardvarks look like, but few people are familiar enough to instantly recognize deviations and thus interpret the image as creepy or disturbing.