Comment by echelon

"style" is apt for many reasons.

I've heard chairs of animation departments say they feel like this puts film departments under them as a subset rather than the other way around. It's a funny twist of fate, given that the tables turned on them ages ago.

Photorealistic models are just learning the rules of camera optics and physics. In other "styles", the models learn how to draw Pixar shaded volumes, thick lines, or whatever rules and patterns and aesthetics you teach.

Different styles can reinforce one another across stylistic boundaries and mixed data sets can make the generalization better (at the cost of excelling in one domain).

"Real life", it seems, might just be a filter amongst many equally valid interpretations.