In the old fairy tale, a fretful fowl named Chicken Little gets bonked by an acorn, mistakes this minor incident for an astral calamity and frightens the neighbors by exclaiming, "The sky is falling!" In the world of traditional animation, when computer-generated (CG) 3-D cartoons came in, the sky did fall. The first piece was Pixar, with such movies as Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Another chunk was DreamWorks (the Shreks). And, yes, an outfit called Blue Sky fell too, with Ice Age and Robots. Hand-drawn, or 2-D, animation was instantly kaput. Chicken Little was right.
In a decade, CG animation...