Despite how much awesomeness goes into it, the final product sadly leaves me unable to think of anything but two words: uncanny valley.

I think in this case it's mostly down to the fact that the robot (fore)head stays perfectly still while the human head wobbles about naturally.

It looks to me like the robot just exhibits less motion in general. This might be because (as far as I can tell) the authors optimize only to match a set of static poses, not for physical or perceptual realism of motion.

For me it's most noticeable in the lips - they just don't move as much as they should.

Especially at spots when there's a labial sound in the speech. Another phrase that comes to mind is, "gottle o' geer".

I often wonder what will happen to us, to our human psyche, to the media, when that threshold is crossed and we no longer know if an actor (in the objective sense) is human or not. It terrifies me and yet I hope I live to see it.

You'll know, because the person helping you at the store is friendly, and actually helpful.

You can't put lipstick on a paperclippy.

Today we still need human actors to portray humanoid robots in movies. Robots will be able to portray themselves long before they can portray humans.

I think this has just started to cross it. It's not perfect, but it's damn close. Of course, if they would have opened the eyes, I would likely think this was weird as hell.

I'm sure that's a valley that will be crossed in relatively short order. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up for debate.

What's interesting about this is that this was in fact a dream that Disney himself had, in the last years of his life he was very focused on Audio-Animatronics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio-Animatronics

Is motion capture not capable of recording full lip movement? The facial muscles look correct, but the lips are dead. For instance I noticed the 3d mesh lips don't pucker outwards when saying words like "you"

More likely the motor/skeleton can't actuate movement in the lips as well, since they stick out from the face.

Disney surpasses skynet's wildest ambitions. Invents more realistic facial expressions than Schwarzenegger.

The facial expressions did look eerily like Stalone's, yes.

"Life Model Decoy"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Model_Decoy

Yet another incredible project out of Disney that belongs in the future. When did they get back to focusing on the world of tomorrow?