Simply put, for a budget of $x, your crew can draw $y miles of lines. How do you use these to fill out the huge number of images you need to produce?

In the West, the solution has historically been to simplify your drawings as much as humanly possible so that you can have a lot of them; we tend to want to have everything constantly moving and changing. Our characters tend to be the barest collection of broad details to distinguish one from another; we are loathe to drop below shooting "on twos"^1.

In the East, they took a different path: They want complicated drawings. So one drawing will linger on the screen a lot longer, pushing up against the moment where a drawing "goes dead"^2 a lot harder. Often you'll build up to a small handful of lavishly animated scenes, where most of the episode's budget is blown at the climax of the episode.

I was raised in the Western tradition^3, and it took a long time to learn to see the craftsmanship and love in Eastern animation. I'm glad I did; I've seen some really powerful and compelling stories that I wouldn't have seen in Western work.

(There are of course broad generalizations, you can find increasing amounts of Western work that's heavily influenced by Eastern animation, and probably vice-versa as well. You can also find expensive shows and cheap shows all over the world.)

----

1: exposing every drawing twice, for an effective frame rate of 12 (animators still like to think in film's 24fps) 2: If a character is moving, then goes perfectly still, there is this weird moment when your brain stops registering it as "something alive that has stopped moving for a moment" and starts registering it as "a static drawing". It's really creepy to see happen. 3: and even spent most of a decade working in it