It's a very slowly regenerating zombie.

Hum... No. Cell shaded games (and such) are not quite tasking in terms of raw power. That's the whole point. Devs use this graphics style because it gets the job done nicely without being a struggle to the system it's on.

Wind Waker is far less demanding than Twilight Princess, for example.

A game using Cel shading is built and rendered exactly like a normal game.
You still have polygons, you still have physics, you still have A.I and you still have shadowing and lighting and shader effects.
The main difference however is that it uses a non-realistic illumination scheme, lighting values are calculated on a per-pixel basis then quantized over portions of shades to create the "flat" look, thus shades and shadows look "flat". (This is one approach anyhow.)

They then use backface culling to give the black outlines or something like a filter that detects edges.

If anyone claims it's a less demanding process than how regular games are built is to be honest... Naive.

You can still have Tessellation, you can still have dozens of dynamic lights and shadows and framebuffer effects and exhorbant amounts of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, with advanced physics and complex A.I.

The main advantage of Cel shading however is that it can hide allot of flaws in an image, you don't see blurry low-resolution texture/low-poly objects, trees, hills etc' in the background, that doesn't make it less demanding or "simpler" by any extent.

As a comparison point between the more cartoony and realistic games, well, you can compare them on technical merits, but it pretty much ends there, artistically they achieve a completely different look which simply cannot be compared.
Besides, many people round these 'ere parts seem to confuse great art (Uncharted, Last of Us) with graphical fidelity (I.E. Majority of high-end PC games).

never heard of jet rocket and it looks pretty ugly from what i seen, and like i said before, very few devs are pushing cartoony graphics, while almost every dev is pushing for realistc graphics, so far less competion.

hmm no. its actually quite heavy on the GPU. Wind waker is far less demanding than TP bywhich measure?

i clearly remember WW having vastly superior animation and much bigger open wide areas

wind waker is a perfect example, it came out 4 years before TP, yet it looks much better then TP because TP was trying to be some what realistic looking and the hardware could not it any justice.

They were fairly on-par technically.
The main advantage Wind Waker had was the Tessellated Water Planes and the fake-HDR lighting scheme.
Otherwise they both had dynamic lighting/shadowing, cloth physics etc'.

Artistically, that's up to personal opinion, where I personally prefer Twilight Princess, but that's not to say that Wind Waker was graphically simple... It wasn't relatively.

Screenshots don't do justice to its 60fps beauty on a screen through component cables, but let's look at one anyway:

As you can see here, every surface has multilayered shaders; the floor is reflective, refractive, and specular mapped, as is the glass and water, character models are specular mapped, the cylinder in the background is normal mapped, the jetpack causes heat distortion, there's global dyanmic lighting, and it all runs at a v-sync'd 60fps.

No other Wii game so effectively leverages the strengths of its GPU.

thing is your comparing hardware thats basically a souped up gamecube, 12 year old hardware, i'm talking about 360/ps3 generation hardware, xbox/ps2/GC cartoonish graphics were still being pushed, although they were starting to fade, and thats clearly a bull shot i have never seen a wii game look so clean.

A cartoon-styled game on Wii U could easily push the system in the same way that Jett Rocket pushes Wii; by doing tons of effects at 60fps.