“The privileged role played by the manual construction of images in digital cinema is one example of a larger trend: the return of pre-cinematic moving images techniques. Marginalized by the twentieth century institution of live action narrative cinema which relegated them to the realms of animation and special effects, these techniques reemerge as the foundation of digital filmmaking. What was supplemental to cinema becomes its norm; what was at its boundaries comes into the center. Computer media returns to us the repressed of the cinema. ... Cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is, rather, a sub-genre of painting."

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (MIT Press: Cambridge, 2001), 259.