If possible, you might look into some sor of free digital editor (like GIMP) and make a sort of premade sprites (similar to what I do in rpgs). Each character would take dozens of poses but when it's time to anime, all you do is add that to a layer by importing to the thing. This would take a lot of time at the start, but once you had poses from each character, as many as needed, an average thing would take alot less time. For instance, if Maytag has a distinctive run, the only time you'd draw different is for a sprint, so animated would make sense if you finished prebuilt characters.
I'd say try Book 0, and see what works. Also if you need voice actors, one of the big advantages of animation is they don't need to be on set. When I was making Oracle of Tao, I hired (well they were volunteers) voice actors from UK and Scotl using something called StarNow.com
Basically whatever you do, figure out how to do it time and money saving, so you cab keep doing it.