It's interesting - if you read some reviews of Pixar films (and indeed one of the preview articles I've read for Shrek 2) people do seem to fixate on the technology more than the actual film.
Toy Story 2 got lots of comments on how the people looked for realistic, Monsters Inc got lots of comments on Scully's fur. Shrek 2 is (again) getting comments on how the people will look more realistic than the first film. I can't remember any review or article remaking on the realistic run animations on the horses in Spirit - something that is notoriously hard to animate - or complementing the realistic perspective on The Iron Giant (yes, I am aware this was done with computers).
Ultimately at the moment all 3D rendering is being done based on realism - see how much care and attention there is to the lighting in Finding Nemo. All the final images are the result of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of calculations based on real-world physics. This is mostly due to it being an offshoot of comercial technology used in the real world for real-world products.
However, people are begining to experiment with none realistic cartoon animation. I saw one short where the calculations for perspective were deliberatly altered resulting in a wierd, twisting depth of field (which sort-of gave me a headache - your eyes know something is wrong, but your brain tries to correct it). Also various filters (like photoshop filters) are being applied to the rendering - resulting in CGI animation that looks like chalk strokes for example.
I think people these days don't understand "abstract" images or "stylised" animation at all. Everything from computer games to special effects in movies are pushing realism to the consumer.
For example I can't count the number of times The PowerPuff Girls is simply dismissed as cheap animation, when it has some of the most consistant and interesting designs in animation today (but I have no doubt that these designs were concieved to save money). While the animation was still limited, I honestly did think that the PowerPuff Girls movies was one of the most visually striking animated movies of the past few years.
Even disney films like Mulan and Hercules have been critisised for having "bad animation". There's nothing bad about the animation at all. In fact I'm sure that technically Hercules has much better animation than the more 'realistic' animation of - say, Cinderella - simply because the designs of the characters make it harder to make them appear to move in a proper 3D way (Check out Meg's hair for example - It works 100% in the movie, but I'm never quite sure how it works...) But people cannot see this - they just see characters with unorthodox (read "bad") designs.
It will be interesting to see what people think to the first CGI animation which doesn't feature correct perspective, realistic shadows and reflections etc. Will people be able to accept abstract CGI? I predict not.
This may appear elitist, but I fear people are loosing the ability to recognise true art due to their obession with reality. And that includes the crtitics, who presumably should know better.
I hope to see it soon!
The article may contain spoilers: