Consistency

People who work in animation know that there has to be consistency between designs and motion. If your character looks like Snow White, it has to move in a more realistic fashion than if your character looks like Dora the Explorer. If Snow White moves like Dora or if Dora moves like Snow White, the results are ludicrous.

I think that the quality of animation since the coming of cgi is getting more subtle. Having done both drawn and computer animation myself, I'm aware of the process of layering motion. In stop motion, you've got to conceptualize everything about your animation before you start as you're going straight ahead. In drawn animation, you have the ability to alter your timing after the fact, but it still takes effort to change details like hands or faces. With cgi, each moving item has it's own timeline and graph, so it's relatively easy to add motion on top of motion or change the timing of one aspect of a character while leaving the rest of the motion unchanged. What we see on screen, at least in features, is motion that's been refined to a high degree.

However, just as there has to be consistency between design and motion, there has to be consistency between acting and character. While the acting has become more complex, the characters have not. What we get in a lot of cgi acting is unjustified subtlety. The acting is too dense for what the character needs to communicate.

The solution is either to simplify the acting or to add complexity to the characters. Unfortunately, animation has a history of refining form while ignoring content, so I expect that the gap between acting and characters will continue to increase.