# The uncanny valley started as a hand-drawn curve > Masahiro Mori's 1970 graph plots comfort against likeness in two curves, one for stillness and one for movement, and the moving curve dips further — that's the whole print. August 20, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-uncanny-valley-is-a-graph A line graph, printed plain. No boxed frame — both axes run straight off the edges of the print. One black curve rises, dips into a trough, and recovers. A red curve follows the same shape but climbs higher and falls further. `STILL` labels the black line. `MOVING` labels the red. ## Why is the whole design just a graph? Because the uncanny valley was never a vibe to begin with — it was a curve Masahiro Mori drew in 1970. Mori, writing in Japanese as *bukimi no tani*, plotted a relationship: as something looks more human, people's comfort with it rises, until it gets close enough that comfort collapses into unease, then recovers once the resemblance is total. That collapse is the trough in the graph. Printing the actual curve, rather than an image of something unsettling, states the mechanism directly instead of illustrating a mood. ## Why does the red line matter more than the black one? Because Mori's detailed version has two curves, not one, and movement is what separates them. The still curve dips; the same figure in motion dips lower and rises higher on either side. Movement steepens the whole relationship, peaks and troughs both. Mori's own example was a corpse, which sits at the bottom of the still curve, set against a moving zombie, which sits lower still on the red one — the same degree of human likeness, made worse purely by moving. ## Why do the axes run off the edges instead of sitting in a frame? Because a boxed chart reads as an illustration of data; an unframed one reads as a fact that continues past what's shown. A hard rectangle around the graph would close it into a picture glued onto the shirt, the finished- object problem [chest prints run into constantly](/stories/pareidolia-in-the-grain) when an image gets an edge it didn't need. Letting the axes bleed off the fabric keeps the relationship looking like something measured rather than something composed for the print. ## Who owns a graph shape from 1970? Nobody owns the relationship the curve describes — Mori published an idea, not a locked image. The term and the underlying claim — comfort dips, then recovers — have been in general use for decades, across robotics, animation and games, and the specific black-and-red rendering here was drawn fresh for this print rather than copied from Mori's own diagram. A concept from a 1970 paper isn't a design anyone can license; the two-colour graph on this shirt is its own artwork. ## Does the same relationship apply to anything besides robots and faces? Yes — Mori's own example wasn't a robot at all. A corpse against a moving zombie is his comparison for the effect, and the mechanism carries over to anything close to human that starts to move: a mannequin, a doll, [an animal that stopped behaving the way an animal reliably behaves](/stories/the-animal-that-didnt-move) rather than fleeing or attacking. Motion is what tips something from merely off into actively wrong. ## Isn't a data graph a strange thing to be afraid of? That's exactly why it works — a diagram of an emotion is a stranger object than a picture of one. Most horror imagery shows you the frightening thing directly. This shows you the shape of the reaction instead, plotted and labelled like something out of a paper, which sits closer to [cosmic horror's preference for the actual scale of a thing over a drawing of a tentacle](/stories/cosmic-horror-print) than to a monster illustration — the print states the mechanism and leaves the imagining to you. ## Does it print well? Yes, with the two curves kept as clean, unshaded lines. A graph loses its point the moment it's rendered soft — the trough needs a hard, legible line, not a blurred one, and the gap between the black and red curves at their lowest point is the entire payoff, so it has to survive at chest scale. Pale grey or bone grounds with black and a single red ink, the labels kept small, read closer to an actual printed figure than to decoration. ## How do I get one made? Describe the curve at [JustOG](/) — how deep the trough goes, what sits at either end. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). The red line dips lower than the black one. That's the whole argument, drawn once.