Puppets are huge these days. Exhibit A is the very funny sock puppet in the Pets.com commercials. I don't know what it is, but I can't get enough of those commercials. I laugh every time.

Some great puppetry is featured in Being John Malkovich. The opening scene was like nothing I'd ever seen before; I had no idea that you could do things like that with puppets.

But I think my favorite puppet appears in this Levi's commercial (well worth the download). How they managed to interject that much personality into a puppet, I will never know.

Animated characters have gotten more personable as well. Like the puppets mentioned above, the robot from Iron Giant and the toys from Toy Story 2 have far more personality that most currently working actors. More on this later.