The best example is Heavy Rain.

Seeing how people praising the realistic looking graphics but all said the animation is not natural.

But they still rate the graphics highly and completely ignored the awkward animation... What do you think?

Though kinda a commonplace, but a grist for your mill - Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, the latter one came out in 2005. PS2 hardware was outdated at the time, but game still was beautiful by numerous reasons, mainly due to carefully crafted animation. A lot of best-looking games on screenshots were butchered by clumsy animation.

Regarding Heavy Rain, I dunno why all of a sudden it even became hyped like a graphics marvel. So the bottomline... 3d models, texture resolutions, animation, overall art-design etc. - all should be taken into consideration when we speak about visual representation.

I'll take animation over graphics any day; this includes Japanese Animation (Anime)

Most character animation is pre-rendered. This means the quality of the animation is entirely based on the skill of the animators; the power of the gaming system is irrelevant. So when people talk about impressive graphics technology, animation quality usually isn't relevant. (Some animation is dynamically generated - most notably ragdoll physics used in death animations. This type of animation is an exception.)

In addition, more realistic graphics requires higher quality animation to look natural, due to the uncanny valley effect. The animation in Heavy Rain suffers greatly from the uncanny valley effect; if the graphics were less realistic, the animation would look much more natural.

Does not compute.

Aren't animation is the technique on how you move the pixels to imitate the natural movement?

Not recently, in Uncharted 2 and other, they react realistically when you shoot them. There are some pre-rendered animations, but they have to be mashed together to make it look good

i find the animations phenomenal.

though kz2, and uncharted 2 are really good,

crysis it's a better example especially.

it should, but people who spend days praising graphics based on screenshots have a very narrowminded view of all this and you'll never have them admit that a ferrari without an engine is nice but not very usefull...

Indeed animation is included in graphics. All other physics too.

You make a good point. I've seen screenshots of some games that looked amazing sitting still. Then, when I got them, the animation was a real turn-off.

I think Heavy Rain is still one of the best looking games, ever, though. I didn't see much wrong with the animation, at all. I just hate the "Press R to walk" controls.