New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell looks at the trend toward computer animation and how it fits into the history of film making. “Every few decades an entire field of filmmaking ends because of a single technical innovation. The Jazz Singer finished off silents by popularizing synchronized-sound movies. The introduction of Technicolor has been slowly choking off black-and-white pictures… And now, because of the successive digitally animated box-office winners from Pixar… hand-drawn animation seems to be on the way to theatrical obsolescence”. Mitchell adds that “old-fashioned hand-drawn works, in the right hands, can still dazzle an audience, as the imaginative and fluid Lilo and Stitch proved”, and that Pixar’s success will be hard to imitate, “which will become obvious when others eventually grind out knockoffs that crash to the bottom of the box-office charts. What animation comes down to, as does any other film genre, is the vision of those making it”.