Mortal Kombat Animation Were Real People

Cosplayers + martial artists performed the moves and many backgrounds were made using real images. I only realized this because of BTS footage. I started with MK 4 which had CGI with some motion capture.

Digitized graphics were used to compete with pixel art that the Japanese developers were especially good at. The reason I never suspected these images to be real humans/objects was because of the image compression that was done to accommodate the machines of 90s.