This article is full of so many interesting details. E.g. I found this passage on the technological progress in rendering snow from Frozen (2013) to Zootopia 2 fascinating:

"To give an example of the amazing amount of detail in Zootopia 2: at one point during production, our rendering team noticed some shots that had incredibly detailed snow with tons of tiny glints, so out of curiosity we opened up the shots to see how the artists had shaded the snow, and we found that they had constructed the snow out of zillions upon zillions of individual ice crystals. We were completely blown away; constructing snow this way was an idea that Disney Research had explored shortly after the first Frozen movie was made in 2013, but at the time it was purely a theoretical research idea, and a decade later our artists were just going ahead and actually doing it. The result in the final film looks absolutely amazing, and on top of that, instead of needing a specialized technology solution to make this approach feasible, in the past decade both our renderer and computers in general have gotten so much faster and our artists have improved their workflows so much that a brute-force solution was good enough to achieve this effect without much trouble at all."

A similar approach was taken by Pixar when making the beach environment for the Piper short that was previewed with Finding Dory. It was absolutely mind-blowing.

https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-1-...

Related but unlinked Part 2 on other aspects of Finding Dory:

https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-2-...

The technology is amazing, but rendering lifelike animation seems such an antithesis to what the medium allows. You literally can do anything and for some reason the choice is to constrain it to reality.

The things that Don Hertzfeldt did with line drawings and a vacuum cleaner embrace the medium so much more.