Why Practical Effects Still Work in a CGI Era

For a stretch of years in the 2000s, it looked like practical effects were on their way out. CGI could do anything — or at least anything a producer was willing to pay for — and physical puppetry, animatronics, and miniature work started to feel like a nostalgic craft. Prestige films kept them alive; most other films did not.

Then something shifted. By the 2010s and into the 2020s, some of the biggest films on the calendar — Mad Max: Fury Road, the Dune films, Nope, The Batman, big stretches of the recent Mission: Impossible sequence — went hard on practical work again. Not because CGI got worse. Because filmmakers realized what they'd been giving up.

Here's what practical effects still do that CGI struggles to match.

Actors respond differently to real things

When an actor is on a real set with a real explosion, a real puppet, or a real prosthetic creature standing across from them, their reaction is doing something CGI can't easily produce: it's real reaction to a real stimulus. The eyes track. The body tenses. The performance is grounded in the actual physical space of the shot.

CGI can be spectacular, but when actors are performing against a tennis ball on a stick or a green screen, their faces have to imagine the thing they're reacting to. Skilled actors can do this convincingly, but it takes work — and audiences are surprisingly good at sensing the difference, even if they can't articulate it. A creature that was actually there tends to feel like it was there, and a creature that was inserted later tends to feel inserted.

Light hits real objects correctly

One of the hardest problems in CGI is matching light. Real objects reflect, refract, cast shadows, and pick up the color of their surroundings in ways that are extraordinarily hard to fake. Every year the tools get better, and every year skilled VFX artists produce shots you'd never guess were computer-generated. But the baseline problem doesn't go away: real objects interact with real light for free, and CGI objects have to be individually made to fake that interaction.

This is why practical models still show up in wide shots of ships, cities, and vehicles in high-end films. A physical miniature filmed on a real set gives you photorealistic lighting without any of the labor of simulating it.

Practical effects age better

Compare a heavy-CGI film from 2005 with a heavy-practical film from 1985. The 1985 film often looks better today. Not because it's technically more advanced — obviously it isn't — but because the practical effects were photographed once and they're the same photograph decades later. CGI is aging against a moving benchmark: what looked good ten years ago now looks like it belongs to a specific era.

Filmmakers thinking about long-term durability of their work — the ones who care about how their film will look in thirty years — often lean practical for exactly this reason. A well-executed miniature or prosthetic in 1995 still looks convincing in 2025. A well-executed CGI shot from 1995 usually doesn't.

The safety valve: hybrid work

The interesting part is that the resurgence of practical effects hasn't been anti-CGI. It's been about mixing the two.

Modern practical effects often exist to give CGI artists something real to work with. A puppet performance gives the compositors light, motion, and physical reference. A real explosion gives them a base to enhance. A prosthetic creature gives them contours to extend digitally. The hybrid approach means audiences get the grounded reality of practical work and the flexibility of CGI at the same time.

The films that still feel most impressive at scale — the ones critics and audiences remember years later — often turn out to be doing this. A high-end CGI-only film can look amazing at release and fade within a few years. A hybrid film with a strong practical foundation tends to keep working.

Why audiences can (kind of) tell

There's a common industry line that audiences don't actually notice the difference between practical and CGI when the CGI is done well. This is partially true. But test screenings and post-release reactions suggest audiences pick up on something even when they can't name it.

Part of that is scale. In a film with hundreds of CGI shots, viewers get subtly numbed to the aesthetic — the specific way computer-generated light looks, the specific way computer-generated physics behaves. When a shot with practical work arrives, it lands with a small jolt of "this feels different." Audiences read that as weight, or presence, or realness. Directors who've been through the release cycle enough times know this and factor it in.

The bottom line

Practical effects didn't die because they were never trying to compete with CGI on the same axis. They were doing something else all along — grounding the performance, playing well with light, and producing footage that ages gracefully. CGI is a spectacular tool for what CGI does. Practical work is a spectacular tool for what practical work does. The films that hold up tend to know the difference.