I think a large chunk of the problem is that we've been concentrating on improving the rendering, which is clearly now phenomenal, and seemingly totally ignoring the animation, which is still abysmal.

CGI characters still move too smoothly. It's all spline curves and jelly physics. CGI is instantly recognisably unreal due to the overly fluid motions and it seems remarkable to me how little progress has been made on this.

Animated characters still look animated, except they dive straight into the uncanny valley because of the incredible rendering. I guess mo-cap only gets you so far before you have to smooth out the noise of the motion signal.

Anyone with actual knowledge of CGI got anything to say about this? It seems weird that everything else moved on while this got neglected.