question: How are some animation movies so realistic?
comment: I think it mostly comes down to the style of animation. Even as technology has improved over the years (look at the difference in animation quality between toy story 1 and 2 for example), certain styles "look" more realistic than others. This is on purpose. If you look at a recent film like Incredibles 2, the quality of animation is great but do the characters look "realistic"? Nope, they're meant to look like cartoons. It's an animated film and it knows it. Going off your example of the adventures of Tintin or A christmas carol, the characters and style were designed to look more photorealistic. It's just the way the animators decided to make it. You can do it with any film; but you might noticed that photorealism isn't always super prominent in the film industry. Most high budget animated films aren't meant to necessarily look "realistic", because the beauty of animation is that you can make it look like whatever you want. Certain styles are more desirable than others. If you remember the film The Polar Express, it was heavily criticized for using a photorealistic style with characters that simply weren't lifelike enough. When your goal is to look as realistic and as close to real life as possible, anything lacking in your quality of animation is going to be much more noticeable.
passages: As for the state of art and animation, Oshii had this to say:
  
  I think that Hollywood is relying more and more on 3D imaging like that of "Shrek." The strength behind Japanese animation is based in the designer's pencil. Even if he mixes 2D, 3D, and computer graphics, the foundation is still 2D. Only doing 3D does not interest me.
   Other techniques can be applied, mathematical functions (e.g., gravity, particle simulations), simulated fur or hair, and effects, fire and water simulations. These techniques fall under the category of 3D dynamics.
  
  Section::::Techniques.:Computer animation.:3D animation.:3D terms.
  
  BULLET::::- Cel-shaded animation is used to mimic traditional animation using computer software. Shading looks stark, with less blending of colors. Examples include "Skyland" (2007, France), "The Iron Giant" (1999, United States), "Futurama" (Fox, 1999) "Appleseed Ex Machina" (2007, Japan), "" (2002, Japan), "" (2017, Japan)
   The animation is a mixture of CGI and 2D animation. Emile and Remy appear in CGI while their presentation is in 2D, which encompasses most of the short movie. The 2D animation in most scenes was done through traditional paper based animation with digital ink and paint while a few scenes such as the "Canada vs. Rats" video game were done in Toon Boom. There is also a snippet of live action film, a clip showing an Oriental rat flea.
   Jon Liang of "UK Anime Network" comments that "A sense of the cool and outrageous is seeped into every pore of the design, ... exaggerated is an understatement here", and notes that the film's "cinema-quality smooth animation" makes "even the most alien of things move naturally and the sense of speed that is often achieved is frequently mind-blowing." He remarks that "the visuals and over-the-top action will most likely overload sensitive brain cells," but concludes by calling "Redline" "an incredibly exciting cinematic experience that doesn't take itself at all seriously."
   BULLET::::- "3D Animation: Child Without a Home" (1977) – Character design
  
  BULLET::::- "Treasure Island" (1978) – Animation
  
  BULLET::::- "The Rose of Versailles" (1979) – Design
  
  BULLET::::- "Animation Kikō Marco Polo no Bōken" (1979) – Design
  
  BULLET::::- "Botchan" (1980) – Animation
  
  BULLET::::- "Tom Sawyer" (1980) – Animation
  
  BULLET::::- "The Fantastic Adventures of Unico" (1981) – Animation
  
  BULLET::::- "Space Adventure Cobra" (1982) – Design and animation – also "" (1982) and "Cobra The Animation" (2010)
  
  BULLET::::- "Cat's Eye" (1983) – Character design
  
  BULLET::::- "" (1983)
  
  BULLET::::- "Oshin" (1984) – Design
  
  BULLET::::- "Mighty Orbots" (1985) – Design
   BULLET::::- "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" (1953)
  
  BULLET::::- "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955)
  
  BULLET::::- "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956)
  
  BULLET::::- "The Animal World" (Opening Dinosaur sequence, with O'Brien, 1956)
  
  BULLET::::- "20 Million Miles To Earth" (1957)
  
  BULLET::::- "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" (1958)
  
  BULLET::::- "The Three Worlds of Gulliver" (1960)
  
  BULLET::::- "Mysterious Island" (1961)
  
  BULLET::::- "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963)
  
  BULLET::::- "First Men in the Moon" (1964)
  
  BULLET::::- "One Million Years B.C." (1967)
  
  BULLET::::- "The Valley of Gwangi" (1969)
  
  BULLET::::- "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1974)
  
  BULLET::::- "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" (1977)
   Section::::Production.:Visual development.
   3D models rigged for animation may contain thousands of control points — for example, "Woody" from "Toy Story" uses 700 specialized animation controllers. Rhythm and Hues Studios labored for two years to create Aslan in the movie "", which had about 1,851 controllers (742 in the face alone). In the 2004 film "The Day After Tomorrow", designers had to design forces of extreme weather with the help of video references and accurate meteorological facts. For the 2005 remake of "King Kong", actor Andy Serkis was used to help designers pinpoint the gorilla's prime location in the shots and used his expressions to model "human" characteristics onto the creature. Serkis had earlier provided the voice and performance for Gollum in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
   Eleven visual effects companies (Hybride Technologies, CafeFX, The Orphanage, Post Logic, Hydraulx, Industrial Light & Magic, R!ot Pictures, Tippett Studio, Amalgamated Pixels and Intelligent Creatures and Rodriguez's Texas-based Troublemaker Digital) worked on the film in order to accomplish over 1,000 visual effect shots.
   The puppets were created with 3D printers, with multiple copies of each character. Eighteen Michaels and six Lisas were created. Johnson was told that such realistic animation would be "disturbing and off-putting", but disagreed. One goal of the film was for viewers to "forget they were looking at something animated and just get wrapped up in the scene", he said; "the challenge we felt with so much animated stuff is that you're always conscious of the animation, and we kept asking, 'What if we could escape that? What would it be like?'". 
   BULLET::::- Sony Pictures Animation – Films include "Open Season" (2006), "Surf's Up" (2007), "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" (2009), "The Smurfs" (2011), "Hotel Transylvania" (2012), "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2" (2013), "Hotel Transylvania 2" (2015), "The Emoji Movie" (2017), "" (2018)
  
  BULLET::::- Sony Pictures Imageworks  – Films include "The Angry Birds Movie" (2016)
  
  BULLET::::- Triggerfish Animation Studios – Films include "Zambezia" (2013), "Khumba" (2014)
  
  BULLET::::- Walt Disney Animation Studios – Films include "Bolt" (2008), "Tangled" (2010), "Wreck-It Ralph" (2012), "Frozen" (2013), "Big Hero 6" (2014), "Zootopia" (2016), "Moana" (2016)
   BULLET::::- Warner Animation Group – Films include "The Lego Movie" (2014), "Storks" (2016), "The Lego Batman Movie" (2017), "Smallfoot" (2018)
  
  BULLET::::- Wizart Animation – Films include "The Snow Queen" (2012), "Sheep and Wolves" (2016)
  
  Section::::Web animations.
   Section::::Production.:Animation.
   A few examples of computer-generated animation movies are "Toy Story", "Frozen", and "Shrek". 
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Animation
  
  BULLET::::- Animation database
  
  BULLET::::- Autodesk
  
  BULLET::::- Avar (animation variable)
  
  BULLET::::- Computer-generated imagery (CGI)
  
  BULLET::::- New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab
  
  BULLET::::- Computer representation of surfaces
  
  BULLET::::- Hand-Over
  
  BULLET::::- Humanoid animation
  
  BULLET::::- List of animation studios
  
  BULLET::::- List of computer-animated films
  
  BULLET::::- List of computer-animated television series
  
  BULLET::::- Medical animation
  
  BULLET::::- Morph target animation
  
  BULLET::::- Machinima (recording video from games and virtual worlds)
  
  BULLET::::- Motion capture
  
  BULLET::::- Procedural animation
  
  BULLET::::- Ray tracing
  
  BULLET::::- Rich Representation Language
  
  BULLET::::- Skeletal animation
   The goal of computer animation is not always to emulate live action as closely as possible, so many animated films instead feature characters who are anthropomorphic animals, fantasy creatures and characters, superheroes, or otherwise have non-realistic, cartoon-like proportions. Computer animation can also be tailored to mimic or substitute for other kinds of animation, like traditional stop-motion animation (as shown in "Flushed Away" or "The Lego Movie"). Some of the long-standing basic principles of animation, like squash & stretch, call for movement that is not strictly realistic, and such principles still see widespread application in computer animation.
  
  Section::::Films.
   In spite of all its success, computer animation still relies on cartoon and stylized characters. 2001 saw the first attempt to create a fully animated world using photorealistic human actors in "", which met with moderate critical success but did not do well at the box office.
   BULLET::::- "Surf's Up" (2007, animated film) - Visual Development
  
  BULLET::::- "Brother Bear" (2003, animated film) - Layout Journeyman
  
  BULLET::::- "Lilo & Stitch" (2002, animated film) - Layout Journeyman
  
  BULLET::::- "Tarzan" (1999, animated film) - Layout Key Assistant
  
  BULLET::::- "Mulan" (1998, animated film) - Layout Key Assistant
  
  BULLET::::- "Fantastic Four" (1995, animated TV Series) - Layout Supervisor
  
  BULLET::::- "X-Men" (1995, animated TV Series) - Layout Supervisor
  
  BULLET::::- "Biker Mice From Mars" (1994, animated TV Series) - Layout Supervisor
  
  Section::::External links.
  
  BULLET::::- Website
  
  BULLET::::- Blogsite
  
  BULLET::::- Philippine Headline News Article
  
  BULLET::::- Asian Journal Article
  
  BULLET::::- Armand Serrano at Good News Pilipinas
   BULLET::::- "Eureka Seven" (2005–2006; animation director, episodes 2, 9, 18, 26, 33, 35, 42, 48, 50; key animation, episodes 1, 9, 14, 26, 35, 48, 50, OP 4)
  
  BULLET::::- "Ouran High School Host Club" (2006; animation director, key animation, clothing design, episode 13; key animation, episode 19)
  
  BULLET::::- "Tenpō Ibun Ayakashi Ayashi" (2006–2007; key animation, episodes 1, 3, 7, 12, 18, 21, 24, OP 2)
  
  BULLET::::- "Bounen no Xamdou" (2008–2009; character design and animation director, OP, ED, episodes 1, 2, 4, 9, 12, 24; key animation, OP)
  
  BULLET::::- "DEVILMAN crybaby" (2018); character design
  
  Section::::Works.:Animated films.
   Certain scenes must be shot rather quickly. If a scene is left unfinished and the weather is perhaps humid, then the set and characters have an obvious difference. The clay puppets may be deformed from the humidity or the air pressure could have caused the set to shift slightly. These small differences can create an obvious flaw to the scene. To avoid these disasters, scenes normally have to be shot in one day or less.
  
  Section::::History.
   Due to the complexity of human body functions, emotions and interactions, movies with important roles for fully 3D-animated realistic-looking human characters have been rare. The more realistic a CG character becomes, the more difficult it is to create the nuances and details of a living person, and the greater the likelihood of the character falling into the uncanny valley. Films that have attempted to create realistic-looking humans include "" in 2001, "" in 2005, "The Polar Express" in 2004, "Beowulf" in 2007 and "" in 2009. 
   Software packages that were primarily used are 3ds Max (for modeling, lighting, rendering), Softimage (for rigging and animation), Digital Fusion (for compositing), Real Flow (for fluid dynamics), Sony Vegas (for editorial), Zbrush and Mudbox (for organic modeling), and VRAY (for rendering).
  
  Section::::Production.:Soundtrack.
   Madhouse has announced this film as being a "3D anime", or a film which brings an anime sensibility and design structure into the 3D CGI world. Unlike in other Japanese CG productions, such as "Final Fantasy VII Advent Children", photo-realism is not emphasised. Rather, attention has been focused on giving the feel of a traditionally-made anime to a completely computerized production. As Madhouse's expertise has long been in the creation of traditional 2D animation, much of the actual 3D animation was done by the French animation studio Def2shoot, the Thai studio Imagimax, and the Japanese studio Dynamo Pictures, with Madhouse providing direction and storyboards.
   For the aesthetics in the background designs, the background layout artists sparingly use digital matte paintings to render out the naturalistic elements, including the trees and the baseball diamond, but they were retouched using Adobe Photoshop as background cards featured in the film. The lighting department would utilize the "Lumiere" software to enhance virtual lighting for the shading form and depth and geometric rendering for the characters' shadows, as well as use real lighting to create cucaloris.
   BULLET::::- Model animation refers to stop-motion animation created to interact with and exist as a part of a live-action world. Intercutting, matte effects and split screens are often employed to blend stop-motion characters or objects with live actors and settings. Examples include the work of Ray Harryhausen, as seen in films, "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963), and the work of Willis H. O'Brien on films, "King Kong" (1933).
   BULLET::::- Peter Nye (Pixar)
  
  BULLET::::- Michael Shantzis (Pixar)
  
  BULLET::::- David F. Wolf (Disney)
  
  BULLET::::- Walt Disney Feature Animation Department
  
  Section::::Technical abilities.
  