Photorealistic animation shortcut?

Photorealistic animation--animation so real that it looked as if someone
simply photographed a scene in real life--has long been a goal in animation.
While the use of computers to create lifelike animation has been a huge
boost toward that goal, from photorealistic still shorts and photorealistic
nonhuman items (or humans who have no skin showing), there may be a
shortcut. Moreover it's a surprisingly simple one:

ALTER THE COLOR.

Altho it may be a cheat, since it requires a subtle change in "photorealism"
from animation that looks like a photograph of real life to animation that
looks like a photograph. IOW, by removing the color, you lower the load on
the computer, and the eye doesn't seem to notice flaws in skin tone, shading
and lighting:

archang...

Also, I'm pretty sure this isn't true in the first place. The
technical problems with convincingly rendered humans aren't just in the
colour, but in colour-independent problems -- the translucency of skin;
the convincing movement of skin (wrinkles and all), muscles, and bone;
and realistic animation.

Ken from Chicago...

Movement would still have to be done well, but lighting, shading,
translucency discrepancies would harder to detect due to the brain
re-interpreting the image compensating for the abnormal over color. It's
like the difference between period pieces or radically different science
fictional settings versus contemporary world settings. We tend to filter out
the expected and notice what's unusual. If the color range is normal, then
we're free to focus on the discrepancies more. If it's in black and white or
some kind of tint, then we're more distracted from typical lighting or
shading issues.

An alternate is tinting the color, giving it a sepia tone (reminescent of
old photographs and films that became discolored with age), or lowering the
saturation of hues overall or tinting it with an arbitrary color (ala Season
1 of CSI:NEW YORK which tinted scenes blue or Mel Gibson in the movie
PAYBACK which tinted scenes aquamarine or Nick Cage in GONE IN 60 SECONDS
which tinted a lot of scenes orange), thusly:

While the eye is adjusting for the differences or lack of color one tends to
not to notice other flaws if there are any, nor can they rely on the usual
color cues that define realism, photorealism--or not.

blue...

In actual fact the human brain processes images a fair bit faster in
black and white. The first trailer you showed is mostly live action
composited on CG backgrounds; are you aware of this?.

The reason most CG or computer game graphics fall down is the balancing
of colour, this is much easier to do if you restrict the pallete. It's
due to the amount of work you have to do (to say nothing of the eye you
have to have). If you take a normal video image and run a pixelation
filter on it so it's quite blocky it actually looks more realistic than
most higher rez graphics, this is due to the colour and movement being
correct and not to do with software at all. It's to do with a coherency
of the look not anything to do with the way your eye adjusts.