There is a rich pipeline of mangas (comics) to anime (2D animation) that is alive and well there.
The U.S. is obsessed with massive studio efforts that all resolve to the exact same character design and animation style (people want the familiar!) But there is a ton of innovation (including AI and 3D usage) as well as a system to support skill handoff that exists outside of Hollywood.
It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.
My absolute favorite for japanese animation (and criminally underrated!) is Redline (2009)-- huge recommendation.
The thing about all that extra funding is that most of it goes to the committee, not to the studios and animators working on it. And because the total manpower of the industry is so limited, that means that an excessive number of projects crowds out the labour that it becomes much harder to try out risky, experimental new things as one might have a decade ago. As the director of Code Geass stated; It would be literally impossible to air Code;Geass today. And the industry does suffer for it, because while there may have been many mega hits, they all largely lack lasting impressionns and fail to reach the legends of the past.
For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai.
Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.
Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too.
With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.
Sazae-san used cels for the openings and endings up until 2013.
Kind of a tangent, but I had a bunch of friends finishing their animation programs at SVA in the early 2000s and they had to do everything traditionally and they all made a huge push to "#Save2D". I personally spent several months helping most of them scan their thesis projects for free.
Despite a lot of willingness the studio support just wasn't there and even with all of them established in their careers now there's just no hope of doing anything that way. I kinda felt bad that they were trained in and judged against a process that's basically dead. Not to say they didn't learn anything but a tremendous amount of their time and money was effectively wasted.
And then so many of them spent their first few years working in industry heavily exploited by the local studios, including years of unpaid work in most cases.
Nowadays with hand drawn stuff you're mostly seeing keyframe work being done and the computer doing all of the heavy lifting with inbetweening with maybe some tweaking here and there by junior animators.
The tools are good enough now where it doesn't even look like shitty Flash animation anymore.
Also don't know what you're trying to show me with this 10 minute video. There's maybe 15 seconds of animation work being done this whole video? I see storyboarding and background painting and audio work but this shows shockingly little animation process...(and what I can see clearly is someone drawing keys...)
I'll admit, though, that while I know and have talked to some people in the animation industry it is not my area of expertise, so I could be completely off base with my observations.