Animation

Animation generation is more common than one might think. Have you ever played a game where an NPC turned to look in your direction? This is a procedurally generated animation.

Mr. I in Mario 64, changing the direction it looks in toward Mario

These types of animations are more intuitively created procedurally. A similar example is an NPC moving towards you as you fled. The NPC would have to procedurally generate the path and animate its position through it. This is only a partial animation, though, as we would still have to animate the walk or run animation as well. The walk/run animation would be much harder to generate procedurally so we usually use key frame animation here.

Animation is something that has been studied in the academic realm for a while. Animating physical reactions is a big part of this study, but natural movement comes up a lot too. We use key frame animation for things like movement because we need the animations to look believable or it breaks immersion. However...