It's also a loving testament to our era of content generation that a frequent task in creating a children's film is solving complex scientific or engineering problems. They recreate so many of the strange nuances and hidden beauty of our world (anisotropic rendering, Navier–Stokes equations, subsurface scattering, caustics, flocking, dendritic growth of snowflakes, global illumination, ...) just so they can render the purest representation of it for us.
I genuinely am so glad for the time I spent in art[1] and computer graphics, though neither have much relevance to my career now, simply as it changed the way I look at the world. When you want to try to recreate a real life scene from scratch you realize just how much happens in the real world without you ever appreciating it[1].
[1]: Even after the physics and science above: Do people frequently travel down this path? Might it become a holloway[2]? Does the roof guttering drain out here? There'll likely be moss or wearing paint. Old stone steps of an ancient tavern? The stone will likely be worn away at the center or on either side of the door. The background scenery in a modern computer graphics film has dozens or hundreds of hours in them and will be filled with nuance and/or in-jokes. If you need to create a background world in any appreciable detail, why not use it as a canvas to keep telling a story?