"...even motioncaptured movements seem unnatural and give no illusion of life." I often agree with this. When digging deeper into the details of why this is th

"...even motioncaptured movements seem unnatural and give no illusion of life." I often agree with this. When digging deeper into the details of why this is the case, it's often because the motion captured data is played back on a model of different proportions than the actor. I think I first noticed this when a magazine article did a writeup on The Polar Express movie. There's a photo of Tom Hanks in a mocap suit beside a rendering of the train conductor in the same pose. The conductor's proportions were completely different from the real Mr. Hanks. I've also noticed this problem when ballet is mocapped and applied to computer models. My opinion, since I'm no CGI expert nor hobbyist, is that actual natural movement has no place in a cartoon. You'll notice that each of Pixar's worlds maintains its own naturalness - Mr. Incredible moves the right way with respect to the 3D model in his own universe as do the other characters. Although they modeled Syndrome's swagger on a Pixar employee (or at least a real human if not a fellow Pixarite), that doesn't mean they applied an actual mocap session's data to the character model. Every time I've seen anything "behind the scenes" of a Pixar film, they're animating movement 'manually' and maintaining a 'natural' feeling within the context if the current project.