i watched how to train your dragon the other day with ten-year old jane. well i'll be damned. the story was cute etc. but the animation just floored me. i keep thinking that cgi isn't quite there: still the motion doesn't look quite right; there is a lot of ingenious compensation for the not-quite detailed renderings; you'd see an amazing mass of tiny people and weren't supposed to quite realize that they were moving mechanically, or that they were basically cut-and-paste iterations of a few figures etc.. here the detail is almost unbelievably replete. the treatment of cloudscapes, fire, water, is not only convincing; it's breathtakingly beautiful. you know i've always kind of laughed off the idea of virtual reality a la matrix on the ground of the incomparable richness of real reality. this was an element of my "bone-head realism": there's nothing like a real world! now i'm not quite so sure.