A good illustration of the importance of lighting (even though it is in a virtual world) is "How to Train Your Dragon". One of the big reasons that looked so damned good was the lighting. They brought in Roger Deakins, cinematographer for most of the Coen brother's films and many other well known films, as a visual consultant.
On Deakins' forum on his web site, a puzzled reader posted asking what a cinematographer does on an animated film. Here was part of Deakins' answer:
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My role on 'How to Train Your Dragon' was as a consultant and very much as part of a team. It is, for sure, a less personal involvement if only because of the numbers of people involved in the process. However, from an early stage I was involved in discussions about the 'look' of the film with the directors, designer and effects super. This involved all aspects of the production from the choice of lens lengths to our approach to 3D. Following that we created a template of images to reflected the arc of the film. Next we created a number of animated reference shots, which depicted the characters in various lighting situations such as a candlelit room, a foggy day in a forest and in moonlight. For the next 12 months I was working with the layout artists (who set the camera) and the lighters (who light the rendered images) to follow through on the whole process. During part of that 12 months I was shooting a (live action) film but I was kept in touch with the production through a dedicated work station.
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Full thread here: http://www.rogerdeakins.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1...
See also this NYTimes article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/movies/21dragon.html?_r=0
The 12 months Deakins spent on this is a bigger fraction of the film's production time than you might expect. Normally animated movies can take 3 or 4 years, but after a couple of years production the producers of HTTYD decided that the story and characters they had would not work. They were doing a faithful reproduction of the book (in which dragons and humans have long been at peace...and the kids are 10), but that was aimed at a younger audience. They needed something that could also appeal to teens and adults, so they replaced the director with Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, and told them they needed to write a new story and new script, with older characters--AND they had stick to the release date, which was something like 16 months away. So, that 12 months Deakins was involved was effectively pretty much the entire development time of the film we actually got.
In one of those weird twists you'd expect to find in the movies, not real life, the reason Sanders was at Dreamworks is that when John Lasseter took over Disney animation, he suggested a bunch of changes to the movie Sanders was writing and directing for Disney, "American Dog". Sanders didn't like the changes, and ended up leaving. (Some reports say Lasseter fired him). "American Dog" got a new director and writer and story and a new name, "Bolt". What it did NOT get was a new release date.