Starting in the mid-1990s, it became clear that 3D was the future for both animation and video games. Toy Story, released in 1995, was the first film animated entirely using computer-generated imagery (CGI), and it sparked an industry-wide trend, with movies like Ants and Shrek following. Even traditional 2D animation as seen in Tarzan or Anastasia began playing with 3D perspective in scenes that made watching the films feel like riding a roller coaster.

Among the highest-grossing animated movies released between 2000 and 2010, the top 20 are all 3D-animated features, with Finding Nemo ($940 million), Shrek 2 ($923 million) and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs ($886 million) topping the list. By contrast, the highest-grossing non-photorealistic-rendered (NPR) movie was Spirited Away ($365 million). In that decade, traditional and NPR animation had a series of subpar performances at the box office: Treasure Planet ($109.6 million); Home on the Range ($76.5 million); and Spirit ($122 million).

For the current majority of animated feature films and television shows, 3D is still in vogue. “One identifying characteristic of 3D is how it more closely mimics our perception of the physical world in terms of representing realistic lighting, depth, shadow, and maintaining the fidelity of the scene elements as they or the camera are animated,” says Phil McNagny, associate professor of 3D animation at NYU. “I think that push to create ever more photorealistic imagery has been a driving force in the development of the tool sets and technology.”

McNagny recalls how the early days of 3D animation felt like a frontier in technology. “3D was celebrated for its advancements on so many fronts—realistic fur and hair, water simulation, ever more realistic light simulation, all of which led to an increase in 3D-animated films, but also resulted in more successful blending of CG animation with live-action in features like the Transformers franchise, Lord of the Rings, or District 9, to name a few,” he says.

It would be easy to assume the pendulum swing back toward a more crafts-based animation style is a spurning of technology, but it’s actually the opposite, McNagny says. He attributes animators’ ability to render 2D and 3D images in a more painterly style to a number of factors, including improved hardware, evolved creative techniques, and a more sophisticated audience that is hungry for novel animation styles. “With each short, feature, or game that has employed these alterations or augmentations, the envelope has been expanded just a little more,” he says.

In mainstream animation, NPR started making a resurgence around 2017 when the first trailer of the Spider-Verse movie came out. The simplified graphic bursts, the lack of motion blur and depth of field was new again for the average blockbuster audience. Many of the film’s scenes looked as if they were pulled directly from the page of a comic book. The animation style was a gamble for the studio, but the film became Sony Pictures Animations’ second-highest-grossing feature behind Hotel Transylvania 2, while its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, would be the highest-grossing animated feature of the whole division (it currently stands at around $620 million).

“We’d worked on this for already a year and a half by the time it came out. The world hadn’t seen any of it, and some of the things we were trying to do felt like risks, and we thought there were too many,” Spider-Verse animation supervisor Joshua Beveridge said at the 2017 Vancouver SparkFX Conference. “We thought the majority of the people might hate it. We thought it was divisive.”

The style has been prevalent in the artistically ambitious independent video game industry for years. Jenova Chen, creative director of Thatgamecompany, is known for his sweeping vistas and richly rendered environments. Gris, by Nomada Studio, has a markedly art-nouveau-meets-manga style with fine linework and watercolor-like coloring. Sable, meanwhile, pays tribute to Studio Ghibli graphics, and the more recent Dordogne and Scarlet Deer Inn pay tribute to, respectively, splotchy watercolor paint and embroidery. “The people who made these are artists, auteurs, and connoisseurs, and I think we kind of want that feeling back of a tailored experience,” Song says.

The notable exception to the indie game aesthetic is Nintendo, who despite its mass appeal has a long history of experimental art direction. All of Nintendo’s Yoshi games look like they come from an arts-and-crafts laboratory: Yoshi’s Crafted World (2019) has worlds made of cutouts of papers of different weights and textures, as does the Paper Mario saga. In Yoshi’s Woolly World, Yoshi makes his way through a hand-knitted world, where the woolen texture is highly visible.

More mainstream productions are consciously seeking alternatives to what Song jokingly refers to as “HD fetishism,” but an art style alone cannot guarantee a production’s longevity. “My take,” McNagny says, “is that a strong story, coupled with all the many elements that successfully bring the story to life, will always play a defining role in determining the impact and longevity of the film. Compared to today’s movies and even some video games, Toy Story looks pretty dated . . . and yet it still ranks highly among my students, many of whom are younger than the film.”