All 6 Uses of

animate
in
Tess of the d'Urbervilles

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five.†
Chpt 3

The corpses of those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as in a resurrection.†
Chpt 6 *

Prince lay alongside, still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated him.†
Chpt 1 *

All the women but Tess fell into animated talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.†
Chpt 2

This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a dialectician.†
Chpt 5

Definitions:

(1) (animate as in: animated by her strong belief)
inspire, make more lively, or bring to life
(2) (animate as in: an animated cartoon)
make a moving cartoon (a film technique that uses a set of gradually changing pictures to simulate movement when played in series)
(3) (animate as in: animate v. inanimate)
alive; or (more rarely) an animal--not a plant; or (more rarely still) the degree to which as an animal feels and thinks

This sense of animate is typically contrasted with inanimate. The adjective animate describes something as being alive--such as a dog. The adjective inanimate describes something as not being alive--such as a rock.

Note that this sense of animate is pronounced differently than other senses. Most senses whether used as a noun or an adjective) rhyme with mate, but this sense rhymes more closely with mutt".
(4) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

Much more rarely, Linguists use the form animacy to describe whether (or the degree to which) a noun feels and thinks. It impacts grammar. For example, in English, "She moved" v. "It moved."