As an animation grad from an art school in America, I can say that animation is a process rather than a genre. This is why I get upset about the new ghettoized "Best Animated Feature" category at the Academy Awards: There's no way that The Wild Thornberry movie and Spirited Away should be in the same category. An animated film can be an adventure, a comedy, a drama, or any combination of genres; the technique is what makes it an animated film, not the content. Beauty and the Beast was nominated (for what reason, I have no idea) for Best Picture years ago, and apparently pissed off enough people in Hollywood that this new category was put into motion.

Think about it: an animation is a series of still images that, when run in succession at a certain speed, seem to move as though they were alive. What's a "real film" then? A series of still frames that, when run in succession at a certain speed, seem to move as though they were alive. How ironic. The only difference is that one uses drawing and one uses real actors.

But then you have sci-fi and event films that have animated creatures or effects. Half of The Two Towers was CGI, and yet it's in the same Best Picture category as The Pianist, which probably didn't have nearly as many effects shots as TTT. Where's the cutoff point at which a film becomes "too animated" to be considered a "real film?" What about "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" -- it has both human and animated characters. Oh, but so does TTT: Gollum... Hmm... The argument gets stickier...

Animation receives the same bad rap for not being "true cinema" as comic books do for not being "true literature." They're made of the same pieces, but the cultural intelligentsia have determined that ONE is "real" and the OTHER is "shallow imitation." I prefer to look past that distinction and appreciate each on its own merit, rather than trying to subclassify them.