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There are differences between Chinese and Japanese stroke order. See the animCJK [0] project for support for Japanese kanji and kanas (demo: [1]).

[0]: https://github.com/parsimonhi/animCJK

[1]: http://gooo.free.fr/animCJK/official/

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animCJK is great, but it only covers the most commonly used Kanji and Hanzi. For example, it doesn't have 鱚. If you need a database that also has hyōgai kanji, KanjiVG [1] is a better choice. (鱚 can be seen here [2]).

There's also the Kanimaji project [3] to animate files in the KanjiVG format, which could be used to get results similar to the Hanzi Writer project. If you use it to produce GIFs rather than animated SVGs, the resulting files are somewhat large though, so I wrote my own (ugly) renderer [4] to get better compression.

[1] https://github.com/KanjiVG/kanjivg

[2] https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html?kanji=%E9%B1%9A

[3] https://github.com/aehlke/kanimaji

[4] https://github.com/Yorwba/kanjivg-gif

Even in Chinese the order may change depending on style or when writing quickly in cursive.

So I think this tool is useful for both.

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