Unless your personal convictions make you see Halloween either as a celebration of the devil or a perversion of folk traditions into a worship of consumer capitalism and the chocolate industry, with small children as its principal ministers (see: any American holiday), you probably think dressing up for Halloween is socially acceptable. The last day of October gifts us justifications for silly, harmful, or downright strange activities: eating alarming volumes of candy, terrifying yourself almost to the point of cardiac arrest, or, in the words of Mean Girls’s Cady Heron, granting young women the unquestionable license to dress “like a slut.” For the rest of the year, however, dressing up as ghosts, monsters, fairies, superheroes, and the like is largely taboo — or, at least, just kinda weird. But some people do it anyway.
If you’ve never heard of it, “cosplay” (coined by Japanese game designer Takahashi Nobuyuki in the 1980s) is a portmanteau of the words “costume” and “play.”¹ By its loosest definition, cosplaying is the act of dressing up as a character, usually a fictional one from a preexisting intellectual property. In its modern form, cosplay probably originated in the 1960s, when fans attended conventions dedicated to dressing up as fictional characters, often from science fiction movies like Star Trek and Star Wars.² The practice has since expanded far beyond science fiction. These days, at a singular convention, you find Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen, Springtrap from Five Nights at Freddy’s, one of the gay rocks from Steven Universe, and multiple Spider-Men walk side-by-side down the same hallway. But cosplaying has become about more than just dressing up; crafting costumes, competing in fashion shows, producing photography and videography, and even performing in cosplay skits are major parts of the cosplay practice.³
Even if it’s nerdy (which is probably the point anyway), cosplay is largely harmless. Recently, however, the practice has caused discomfort among laypeople on social media, not due to moral qualms or straightforward anti-dork sentiments. Rather, people seem unsettled by cosplayers’ style of expression. Take, for instance, My Hero Academia cosplayer @rccozz on TikTok.⁴https://youtube.com/shorts/EUpJ0ZNYTEE?feature=shared As she switches between characters from the anime series, her eyes and smile are unnaturally wide, her movements are stiff, her expressions are exaggerated. Whether especially bouncy, bright, grim, or mechanical, cosplayers’ mannerisms never read as quite right. It feels not quite human, not fitting inside the real world. Or, as a few people have expressed to me with the concerningly-nebulous-but-really-cool word that deserves its own digression: uncanny.
As a term, “uncanny” is vaguely defined and liberally used. The word has been thrown around to refer to the unsettling nature of animatronic puppets, the soulless characters in Polar Express, and, more recently, humanoid androids and AI-generated media. To get a thorough enough understanding of the uncanny to adequately apply it to cosplay, however, we need to turn to everybody’s favorite Austrian mother-fucker enthusiast: Sigmund Freud.
Unsurprisingly, the man who related everybody’s psychological state back to their phallus (or lack thereof) was really into the uncanny—so much so, in fact, that he wrote his creatively titled book, “The Uncanny.” Here, Freud writes about what, in its original German, is called the “unheimlich” (or, literally, “the unhomely”), which refers to the aesthetic of all that was once familiar, was then defamiliarized, and has since returned to generate unease.⁵ More specifically, Freud builds off fellow theorist Ernst Jentsch’s claim that a sense of the uncanny is produced when there’s “doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive” or “whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate.”⁶ In response, Freud dives into how children carry an “animistic” view of the world — where everything, whether sentient or not, is imbued with a human spirit — a view that most people eventually grow to dismiss. But, when we encounter something that puts stress on our conceptions of reality, and fall into the kind of uncertainty that Jentsch discusses, we experience a sense of the uncanny. Freud calls on the example of children’s toys: kids often believe or hope their toys are alive, but adults who have left their wonder behind would likely be horrified with that reality. According to Freud, that explains why creations like automatons and androids, who seem to possess their own life, tend to be labeled as uncanny. In particular, the fact that they approach humanity without quite reaching it — a zone of non-personhood termed “the Uncanny Valley” by scholars long after Freud — contributes to that tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity.
Cosplay seems to slide into the Uncanny Valley from the opposite direction: cosplayers take a step away from ‘normal’ humanity rather than towards it. Scholars of media studies often point to the ways that cosplay is a form of pretend-play, a kind of play where “reality is transformed into an alternative scenario.”⁷ Specifically, media scholar Nicolle Lamerichs claims that cosplay isn’t about attempting to realize fiction, but rather about “personalizing it” and “engaging with one’s own felt body more deeply by relating it to fiction.”⁸ In other words, cosplay makes the performer’s body a vessel that reflects the very human vision of the performer while harboring a non-human entity.
For a corporeal person to perform a modified version of a character demands a particular kind of replication that isn’t a neat reproduction of the character’s appearance.⁹ That is to say, it’s true that cosplayers must use visual elements to achieve the essence of their version of a character, but the original character must still be recognizable — a process that involves more than decent costuming. To capture the spirit of a fictional character, cosplayers need to make those characters recognizable in their flesh. This is where performed behaviors come in: cosplayer’s replication of characters’ speech patterns and physical mannerisms are what makes the character still ‘themself’ in a new vessel. This kind of performance is also what makes cosplay so uncanny, but what specifically makes it so unsettling? To answer this question, I’d like to explore what I see as the inverse practice to cosplay: rotoscoping.
As I learned in the course, Film and Media Studies: Animation taught by Professors Russ Leo and Monica Huerta, rotoscoping is a technique used in hand-drawn animation where a live performer is recorded, and animators trace over the video with an animated character completing the same action. This technique allows the resulting animation to be more fluid without demanding additional effort from animators. But, most of the time, rotoscoped animation clearly looks rotoscoped, and it’s particularly apparent in earlier works. For example, Betty Boop’s “Minnie the Moocher” short features a musical number with a walrus dancing in a cave (yes, take this seriously).¹⁰ The aforementioned walrus moves not only with increased fluidity, but with a sense of weight and anticipation of movement, as if he carries a life that isn’t his own, which is exactly what he’s doing. His movements are a rotoscoping of a performance by dancer Cab Calloway. In other words, our walrus is ‘haunted’ by Calloway, and its movements clearly don’t fit within what non-rotoscoped animation could convey. What results, then, is a tension upon the ‘reality’ that animation constructs, and, in turn, a feeling of the uncanny.¹¹
Cosplay performances work in reverse. Instead of fictional characters replicating the motions of human performers, cosplayers attempt to replicate the mannerisms of fictional characters. This tension is most apparent in anime and cartoon cosplayers, who tend to speak and move in ways that or more extreme or spectacular than real people do in real life, whether very enthusiastically, very gruffly, or very whiny. Because making photorealistic drawings that convey emotions and expressions as humans would is both wildly expensive and absurdly labor-intensive, animators instead draw simpler, more exaggerated illustrations of characters’ actions to make their emotions and intentions more clear. These logics of expression work in fiction, because by definition they don’t need to operate by the rules of reality. (This same idea applies, albeit to a lesser extent, in live-action film and TV. Although more realistic, characters onscreen typically act a little more pronounced than real people do.) But cosplayers bring the physical exaggerations of fiction into the real world, performing a sort of ‘reverse rotoscoping’ that makes the uncanny physically immediate. Rather than being an inanimate object that unsettles audiences by approximating life, cosplayers perform the essence of their chosen character by adopting a mode of behavior that breaks from conventional life.
In other words: cosplayers aspire to both replicate and reinterpret characters, thus constructing an entity that is neither purely human nor purely fictional. Still, this entity has a vivacity—an anima, if you will—that fuels cosplayers’ physicality.
In other, other words: cosplayers become haunted by the very soul they’ve created, leaving us unsure whether they’re people after all.
It seems, then, that the discomfort associated with cosplaying is inherent to the form. But maybe that uncanny imprint that cosplay can leave on outsiders like me is a good one. Maybe cosplayers perform an essential function, interrogating what we believe is ‘realistic,’ what kind of life we breathe into fictional beings, and what modes of expression we consider acceptable. Maybe summoning the uncanny isn’t an occupational hazard for cosplayers. Maybe, just maybe, the uncanny is exactly the point.
¹Lamerichs, Nicolle. “Embodied Characters: The Affective Process of Cosplay.” In Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures, 199–230. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv65svxz.14, 201; Skentelbery, “This Cosplayer Has Claws: The Disruption and Replication of Gendered Norms in Cosplay Communities,” 1.
²Lamerichs, “Embodied Characters,” 200.
³Lamerichs, “Embodied Characters,” 202–203.
⁴https://youtube.com/shorts/EUpJ0ZNYTEE?feature=shared
⁵Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 2003, 124.
⁶Freud, The Uncanny, 132 & 135.
⁷Lamerichs, “Embodied Characters,” 204.
⁸Lamerichs, “Embodied Characters,” 205.
⁹Lamerichs, “Embodied Characters,” 204.
¹⁰https://youtu.be/PHqjMhD04uA?feature=shared
¹¹I’d also argue that motion-capture techniques for 3D animation is what gives films like Polar Express (2004) or A Christmas Carol (2009) their uncanny qualities.