I checked out the appleseed promo - impressive work. reminds me a bit of this series I was just watching, called gravion zwei. now, instead of hiring a studio of 100 korean cartoon artists and auxiliary personnel to animate their movie, they can hire a studio of 100 korean max or lightwave operators and auxiliary personnel. it might speed things up a bit or allow more special fx, but I have a feeling it's going to be even more expensive to pay all those guys' salaries, software costs, render farm fees, etc. however, the advantage to using human artists is that they have actually studied human dynamics, facial expressions, etc. and they have a great deal of empathy with their subjects. this is not the case with computer operators tied to their consoles 24/7 without any useful real-world life experience. their lack of experience with live humans means that they will not know how to animate a girl laughing or crying, and they will not know how to animate the various ways a girl can walk across a room. in short, every thing they do will be derivative of some other movie they saw, or some bvh file they downloaded, or some figure they bought at turbosquid or one of the higher-priced vendors in an effort to pad their expense accounts.