Make a search on the Web for the term Triple I demo. You are looking for their Information International, Inc. (Triple I) 1982 demo reel. YouTube, archive.org, or some other site should have the video. It's mostly the same production crew, just a short time later with an art director Richard Taylor added. The magician, Adam Powers was the first character animation. Note how they pushed their simple geometries farther with the Allied Stars logo, and started to integrate backgrounds to create complete scenes. With their work on Looker and Westworld they also incorporated computer graphics with film. Their modeling has improved so that now they can model an entire human body. Similar to you, their work was simple at first, but it got better.
Watch it now and enjoy it.
In the first demo reel, the animation was pretty much objects floating in space. In the 1982 demo reel, the background becomes an integral part of the scene, and in the Adam Powers section we have a simple character animation, and he has to interact with objects in the scene. The team was the same people, with the addition of an Art Director. So we can see that using principles of graphic design is starting to make a difference.
Pixar was the first place that combined computer animation technology with traditional animation techniques. While the modeling and rendering were no better than anyone else at that time, the use of the 12 animation principles revolutionized computer animation. When it was introduced, other animators were in awe.