On Kingdomhearts2.net is a high-res trailer of Kingdom Hearts 2.

Agrabah and Team Aladdin return in Kingdom Hearts 2, the sequel to one of the best selling Playstation games Kingdom Hearts. SQUARE ENIX and Disney teamed up again to bring Sora and his friends into the world of Disney. Next to Agrabah many more worlds from other Disney classics such as Hercules, Mulan and Beauty and the Beast.

Look in Disney characters great in 3D in Kingdom Hearts the sequel brings beloved characters like Aladdin allot closer to his traditional drawn counterparts including good facial expressions. Faces are one of the hardest things to get right and realistic with computers, it works CG characters like Buzz and Shrek because they where designed to be 3D in CGI but for characters that where born on paper it’s very hard. For example see the Aladdin computer games released in recent years, Al’s face is only a texture on a polygon model.

PS3 is on it’s way so in 3 years from now KH3 might be on the same level as traditional.

Seeing that near-realistic versions of Disney traditional animated characters can be re-created in 3D gives me hope for the future if the people running the show at Disney Animation decide to create CG versions of their characters. As long as they use the models created by SQUARE ENIX, these people can do magic.