Here's a really interesting Times of London story (and a neat video) about new photo-realistic CGI computer chip technology that's pushing computer animation into a whole new quality realm. Thanks to my cousin Phillip who spotted this one. This animation is extremely life-like. Animation used to take months to create and it never had these subtleties - the subtleties of facial expression that make it look lifelike. Is it perfect? No, but it's getting pretty darned close.
Twenty five years ago when I was cutting my teeth in the ad biz creating Pink Panther commercials for Owens Corning, we would send rough storyboards to an animation company to ink each cell individually. Today the Simpons is one of the last animation shows still creating animation the 'old fashioned' way. Supercomputers are simplifying both speed and the human factor, and they are making animation available at price points that production companies had never imagined in the past.
Finally why use animation? Animation can do things not physically possible like taking you seemlessly inside a functioning nuclear reactor or engine, or quickly transitioning from an aerial view of a town in space to street level -- all at costs unlikely to make a client's stomach turn.