IN PRAISING animation, I'm not asking you to get out of your seat and start dancing like the Tin Man.

I'm using the posh word for "cartoons". As Pixar – the maker of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Cars – celebrates its 25th anniversary, we're reminded that cartoons are better than reality. What isn't?

From early attempts, such as Disney's Steamboat Willie in 1928, through the chiropody classic Happy Feet, to recent feline-good features such as Puss In Boots, animation has advanced by leaps and, arguably, bounds.

CGI – Computer Geekery Imitation – has led to cartoons becoming better than realistic because everything is bright and clean. Cartoonland is devoid of blood and muck. It's an ideal world to which we all aspire and I'm increasingly of the view that mankind and cartoonery are coinciding.

Some pop stars you see nowadays look like cartoons, with their blemish-free coupons, meticulously drawn hair and unearthly shininess. The Arsenal football team also seems to be made up of cartoon characters. I'm convinced that at least one striker is a CGI creation smuggled onto the pitch by manager Arsene Wegner.

At the same time, other cartoon characters are leaping out of the screen at us, living and moving in 3D. Soon, the screen between us will dissolve and we'll all be living in a cartoon. Our enemies will be the weirdies who play computer games. No-one can have been surprised to hear that crazed Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik spent 12 hours a day on these orgies of simulated violence before he turned real life into the nightmare of his fantasies.

The next great war will feature Steamboat Willie, Kung Fu Panda and Arsenal against Thorpuke, Skullcuddler and the Dark Laird. You have been warned.