Great find. I find it interesting how people are so quick to support negative things as facts.

Huh, it doesn't make sense to make a fully animated 3D model.
Anyway those pictures are still inconclusive, is there a way to move the camera around and actually see it rendered from a different angle?

DK is technically a sprite rendered from a 3D model on the fly. At least that's what I remember reading a while ago after game release, never bothered to check this out though. Not sure what so negative about that.

@underlined.

No rare didnt do that. DKC on snes was a full 3d character built on the same PC that did Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park 1.

I have the making.

I kinda figured this was false, because the DK/Diddy models in DKC Returns weren't really all that great. Obviously they spent most of their "poly budget" on the backgrounds, the DK model in DK: Jungle Beat is better.

If they were using an animated sprite why not just make DK look like a CG render, with the fur and everything:

No need. Sprites get blurry when zoomed into (see textures of the surroundings in DKCR), whereas polygonal models stay clear/get clearer (AA).

Ever wonder why the Wind Waker still looks good after all these years? The game doesn't use textures the way most games do. After upping the resolution, the models become clearer and the benifit greatly from the extra AA done by emulators. However, nothing can be done for the HUD, for example. It is, infact, a 2D sprite.

Full image: http://nintendoeverything.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/wind_waker_1080p-1.jpg

You can zoom on sprites too as long as the original is of high enough quality, but I see your point. Why do that if the game was only designed to run at 480p.

Link?

It was in Dolphin emu thread on NeoGAF:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=395121&page=42

But again it's undecided for me. Some blame framebuffer hack that deluded people to believe characters look like sprites (and they surely are when played not on actual hardware), but there was some discussion going on so you might just to check it out for yourself if interested and tell the world. I never cared in the first place.

Maybe it's a 2D polygonal character.