Steven Paul Leiva gives an opinion in an argument that will only grow more complex through future technological advances. It's how to define "animation" in a world where there are things like Motion Capture and other techniques that do not involve someone sitting at a drawing table and starting with a blank piece of paper…or, I suppose, sitting at a computer and starting with a blank screen.
For reasons of length I assume, Leiva's piece only scratches the proverbial surface of the debate. For starters, you have to discuss how much some Motion Capture projects have artists altering those images. Then you need to address Rotoscoping — the time-honored process where a live-action film is shot and then artists trace it and use it as the basis for animation. You'd probably have to differentiate the way someone like Max Fleischer used Rotoscoping on his early cartoons from the way W. Disney used it on his features…and later, the way Ralph Bakshi used it on his Lord of the Rings film. Especially in the last of these, there was "animation" that is less animation than some of what results via Motion Capture.
But maybe it's all animation in some way, and certainly there will be projects in the future which further confuse the line of demarcation. I don't have any strong feelings about this debate except that I think we're going to hear an awful lot about it. I also think that nothing will ever be resolved to the satisfaction of anyone except maybe a party who's more likely to win an Oscar because some entity has decided that Film A is a cartoon whereas Film B, which some people think is a cartoon, isn't.