As I read it, Sven meant that glass plates etc were film processes.

Although technically I think they're called opticals. Some are in camera, while others are literal optical effects created by doing strange things with celluloid strips, light sources, notors, mirrors and handpainted film frames. (E.g. the stargate sequence in 2001, which was partly a motor-driven effect.)

You can - of course - park a painted plate in front of a digital camera as easily as in front of a film camera. I'm fairly sure people still do this, although perhaps not as much as they used to.

The SF namechecks were both CGI (so far as I know.)

To confuse things further, CGI usually means - in practice - seamless photorealistic simulation.

Animations, especially when they're non-narrative eye-candy, seem to be called motion graphics - although this depends on the industry, to an extent.

In ads, if it moves it often seems to be called motion graphics. In movies, it's called CGI. In music promos it can be either.

There used to be a difference in styling between Hollywood/ILM CGI and the cheaper and more stylised effects you'd see in ads, but that gap has narrowed over the last decade.