The Foetal Consequences Award goes to the Squid Game baby

SINGAPORE – The good news is that no real babies were harmed in Netflix’s South Korean series Squid Game (2021 to 2025) over its third and final season. The bad news: the digital-animatronic infant looked like it was made for a display at a wax museum.

Fans of the deathmatch thriller suspected – correctly, as it turned out – that Player 222 Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) would give birth during the season and the child would be central to the season’s arc.

In June, the new season dropped, as did Jun-hee’s baby. While most were happy with the way the story unfolded, they were much less pleased with the newborn, which looked off in the way that most bad computer graphics look off. Its plastic skin and unnatural movements made it look like a lost prop from a horror movie.

It was not so much an infant as a deepfake of an infant.

This award goes to the Squid Game production team for previewing the footage and saying, “That’s fine.” It shows that they are, like the rest of us, fallible humans who are blind to their flaws.

Player 222, as the Squid Game newborn was called after she was given her dead mother’s number, would not have become a meme if the show had not let the camera linger over her as much as it did. Anyone with a functioning pair of eyes would have advised the team to either resort to quick cuts or reduce her role in the show.

The creators chose to do neither, and their hubris gave internet comedians a fat, juicy target. A newborn shrouded in tragedy, who would spark nobility and selflessness in others, became something for comedians to riff on.

This award is also retroactively given to other shows in the Bizarre Baby Hall of Fame. Renesmee from vampire romance The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012) looked like she was filmed through a TikTok skin-glow filter and took viewers out of the movie, as did the obviously plastic baby in the war drama American Sniper (2014).

The mocking that followed the release of these movies should have put pseudo-infants out of the game forever, but the message never made it to South Korea, the home of Squid Game.

Film and TV crews have long struggled with replacing babies with an actor who will work long hours and does not need constant diaper changes. Shows with lower budgets would show a character rocking a baby-shaped, cloth-wrapped bundle that was never opened. Bigger budgets allowed for real babies, but briefly, and in fleeting close-ups.

This award recognises that Squid Game producers could have used a real baby for Player 222’s close-ups, but chose to kick the responsibility down the road and let the boffins in digital effects handle the problem, in a way that speaks to the soul of anyone who has worked in a large corporation.

It is a warning to any producer or director who thinks of digital effects or AI as the universal cure for the lack of time or budget. Use real people, always. Viewers are more forgiving of a suspiciously plump and mature-looking newborn – which happens all the time in movies – than they are of a creature that would give any mother the heebie-jeebies.