[adam]

I think, Sean, that while most people here make no real distinction between animated films and non-animated films in terms of potential, most of us are aware that a significant proportion of people would categorize them as children's movies, and, in fact, you would find this confirmed if you did a poll of actual animated movies. They are more likely to be targeted at children. This isn't a rule, but it is a trend. Now, thanks to some brilliant work done all over the world (The Triplets of Belleville, Spirited Away, Finding Nemo, etc) there are a great deal of animated features that, while one might still say they are targeted primarily towards children, they also carry clear nods to the adults in the audience. (edit: I don't even think it's fair to say that they are targeted primarily at children, but, let's say, they still reference the traditional elements of a children's story.)

Now, for myself, there are very few (any?) live action children's movies that I get excited about. I am more likely to see a children's movie if it is animated than if it is not.

I think the general public is more likely to categorize movies based on the fact that they're animated than specific traits of the movie. I have some friends who have only seen poor-to-mediocre anime, so I find it nearly impossible to get them to watch good anime, because they've developed the response, "I don't care for anime." Content is secondary, or, rather, they think that the genre (anime) dictates elements of content (tentacle rape) that they don't like. (edit: Rereading this later, I realize this broadly applies to many things beyond animated movies; people marginally familiar with genres associate that genre with its most memorable examples. Animated movies are for kids. Comic books are about superheroes. Hip-hop music is about mysoginy and violence, etc.)

With regards to your examples, I think when movies are partially animated, but are at least partially live-action, they tend to fall into traditional categories: Stuart Little is a children's comedy or something, and Sky Captain is a retro-futuristic adventure movie. Once they become solely animated, the general public perception shifts from those types of genres to "an animated movie" (implied = probably children's), and only a certain sub-group of people realize that there's more to it than that.

I suspect Tom's qualification relates to his awareness of that "general public perception", despite the fact that he has no real personal bias, just as I would feel it necessary to warn my anime-wary friends that I'm inviting them over to watch an awesome anime movie.