viz.

Perhaps, but I'm a bit skeptical about triumphant progressive narratives, especially when Disney is trying to tell me how much better it is now than before. Yeah, the beautiful CGI Disney-castle-on-the-shores-of-a-mysterious-river logo sequence is more visuall arresting than the previous flat logo, but does that accurately reflect the films themselves? Is this castle more impressive or thoughtful or more modern or more anything, really, than the castle found in Sleeping Beauty? I'm not sure.

I'm more interested in who is doing the animation, how, and with what degree of artistic freedom than in whether the medium is software code or watercolors. In some of the best CGI productions, the massive manpower involved seems to result in a lot of creativity. Take Brave, for instance, which has only an okay script but whose visuals marry Celtic-themed artistry, technical innovations in the representation of hair and textiles, and sense of humor quite nicely. I'm not sure that such a thing has a measurably political effect, but whatever effect it creates has to be the opposite of the average Hollywood blockbuster, where CGI artists are generally not respected enough to be told about the movie's themes, attitude, and nature.

When Joss Whedon personally met with the team that animated The Hulk for Avengers: Assemble, they were blown away at the opportunity to see themselves as collaborators. More commonly, I understand that the process is similar to that used in Pirates of the Caribbean, where the team making the skeletons saw only soundless prints of the scenes they were supposed to animate. As a result the movie had CGI skeletons that looked impressive (I suppose) but were jarringly out of sync with the tone of the rest of the film. So CGI can enable thoughtful storytelling, or it can enable increasingly thoughtless schlock. And again, I'm not sure necessarily how much of a difference either makes in terms of shaping our cultural attitudes.