Akademik

n.

Feelings of boredom and frustration caused by viewing movies that use excessive or inferior digital special effects.

The Yoda puppet in the second and third "Star Wars" sequels turned in a performance, a performance that Mark Hamill could watch and react to and play against. The CGI Yoda in the prequels was great for light-saber battles, but when it came time to bandy words with Samuel L. Jackson or whomever, "there was no there there," to misquote Gertrude Stein. I guess I am just suffering from CGI fatigue.

—Steve Penhollow, "CGI tops marks against 'Skull'," Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, June 1, 2008

"I realized about a year ago I no longer had to be the film critic," said Hunter, a successful novelist who has a book coming out in September and commutes from Baltimore. "Part of it was New York Avenue fatigue, part of it was movie fatigue, part of it was CGI fatigue," he said, referring to digitally rendered movie special effects.

—Frank Ahrens, "More Than 100 Post Journalists Take Buyout," The Washington Post, May 23, 2008

Singer prefers making spectacle over making sense, but at this point some of us are suffering CGI fatigue. The soft edges of digital animation are an upgrade from the hard lines of blue-screen effects in the original movie, and now we can hear the shower-curtainy rustle of Superman's cape.

—Chris Garcia, "Able to leap expectations in a single bound? No," Austin American-Statesman, June 28, 2006

CGI is short for "computer-generated imagery" and it refers to those special effects that are rendered digitally. A related phrase is special effects fatigue, which dates to 1999:

I don't know about you but I'm definitely suffering from an acute attack of special effects fatigue this summer. So I could have done without Wild, Wild West, a would-be oddball comedy that tries to dazzle with technical trickery but only succeeds in shooting itself in the foot.

—Richard Williamson, "Unfunny jokes fall flat in tame, tame, western," Sunday Mercury, August 15, 1999