A total eclipse of the uncanny valley.
I blame Patrick Neilsen Hayden, for posting about the music video made up for Total Eclipse of the Heart (the song was written by Jim Steinman, performed by Bonnie Tyler, and made immortal by one of the best drug rock videos that came out of the 1980s.) The posting pointed out a remix music video that was done with snippets from the Teen Titans anime; the post that this particular article linked to pointed at Yet Another remix video that was done with what appears to be cut scenes from the Kingdom Hearts PS/2 game.
Now, I'm a luddite, so I'd never seen the Teen Titans anime, and since I've never had a PS/2 I've never been seduced into playing Kingdom Hearts, but I had my own prejudices before I watched these videos; Mitch Clem did a KH2 based cartoon a while back, and when I read about KH2 I developed an intense lust to play the game, but I knew that the Teen Titans were based on the regular old comic book Titans, which at least to my mind translated to the traditional comic book "all the girls are sex on wheels, and dressed to show it; all the men are sort of boring triangular blocks".
Oh, ho, no no no, I was wrong.
The Teen Titans video (which is a pretty slick propaganda piece for Robin/Starfire shippers) is stunning. Starfire, unlike the horrible way she's drawn in the "grown up" comic books, is not sex on wheels (the illustrators, in a fit of common sense, seem to have decided on more sensible costuming (well, for an anime) and less hormone-driven bodies, so the characters are skinny big-headed big-eyed cartoons.) But she, and the rest of the characters, move gracefully, and are drawn expressively, to the point where they almost seem like real people.
The Kingdom Hearts video, on the other hand, is unsettling. They are still cartoon characters, but the human characters (I think this video is for Sora/Kairi shippers, because it does seem to spend an inordinate time on the two of them) are just a little too realistic, because they look like they're molded from animate plastic, and it's kind of creepy. (Donald Duck and Goofy, now there's nothing real like them, so it doesn't matter than they're injection-molded animate plastic.)
This is, apparently, a well known phenomena. Clive Thompson wrote about it in Wired about a year ago, and basically the argument is that as things get more real, you can't fill in the gaps and thus the unreal parts become painfully obvious (things like the wrinkle-free skins of the KH characters. Sure, Robin and Starfire are flat cartoon cutouts, but you expect that a cartoonish character will look cartoonish, and then you can fill in the humanity from the expressiveness of their eyes, faces, and movement. Sora, well, if you get too close there's just noting you can expect except humanity, and it's not there.)
It's not just anime, either. There are online comics which have gone from a pleasantly abstract sketchiness to attempting to make themselves more realistic, and it's not a particularly appealing sight. The comic strip Questionable Content has done that; Jeph Jacques started with a very minimalist drawing style, then slowly changed to a more detailed style which certainly is more detailed, but which is, at least for me, just annoying (I have good experimental evidence that boys have lips in real life, but not in this strip; the girl-lips here, on the other hand, appear to be MORE REAL than the rest of the comic. I dunno. I just treat Questionable Content like Playboy now; I try to ignore the art and concentrate on the dialogue, which, in a sign that there is a G-d, is maintaining the level of 20-something angst and Faye-rage which attracted me to the comic in the first place.)