Bigger and Bolder: Complexity in Digital Animation Effects

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 apparently caught some professional eyes, and it's not just because of its leading box office score.
What we're seeing here is some major leaps in what people can do with digital animation, and if you didn't notice, here are a few to look back at again.

-Nonphysical physics? This sounds like something that could easily kill a robot, computer, or any AI, but somehow Sony did it. The film uses many simulations to gain the effects you see, but these simulations are grounded in real life physics, and the movie? Yeah, not so much. What you have here is in a sense, bending reality. You'd think a person would have to have a degree in quantum engineering to pull that off, but it seems that's not so when you've got the right software!

-Fluid effects that are more technical than they appear. What you see here is animators taking real life water simulations and modifying them to a cartoony style. Real life is far from the style the movie presents, so of course a little breaking of the rules is involved. The crew at Sony established that the highest importance was making the shots look good. From that basis they modified how the water acted and how the gravity functioned. Do it enough, and you've got movie quality gold.

-Multicharacter juggernaut. There's a big scene featured in this film. It involves 1000 frames, and many, many characters all doing their own thing with the world interacting to each individual. Your home computer would have already crashed, and I don't care how many numbers your Nvidia GPU has. In complex acts like these, the animators considered it a nightmare, but with the end result? Totally worth it.

I think pushing the boundaries like this is a must if we are to keep pioneering digital animation. We need to push ourselves and our technology to the limit to learn the most we can. There's always room to improve.

In cases like this though, it's a little disheartening to me how much computer intensive this becomes. Compared to doing something like this in a 2d style animation (I.E. suicide) the 3d seems to take away just a slight amount of the impressiveness of these feats. But just a slight.

That's all I can really say on the topic. Would you suspect the other major studios to be pushing the envelope too? (I have a fear Pixar is starting to ease up.)