Puppetry as a Genre?

I'm not sure how the likes of Brad Bird would feel about this, as they feel that animation shouldn't be its own genre.

I can see where they're coming from, in a way, that'd almost be like making black-and-white a genre, but the way I see it, if animation has to be its own genre, perhaps puppetry should be as well?

Think about - already when it comes to programs that are mostly puppetry, they're catergorized into two different genres: fantasy or animation. Now fantasy, I can understand, because quite a lot of puppetry projects out there are very heavily fantasy oriented, and that's easy to come by, because of an endless array of different fantasy characters that can be brought to life in the form of puppets - talking dragons, eight feet birds, Fraggles... pixie fairies... on the other hand, I don't see puppetry as animation - animatronics is one thing, but in this case, we're talking about animation as cartoons, as Sesame Street is under the Cartoon section of FanFiction.Net, or the shows Sid and Marty Krofft created are refered to as "Saturday morning cartoons".

So basically, when you boil it down, I really feel that puppetry should be its own genre as well; the art form seems to be in a bit of a slump as it is, what with lack of Muppets right now, but it's just as a big a part of the entertaiment industry as animation, I believe.