Yes improvements have certainly been made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TxPRlnnBLoBut ultimately, the thing about 3D anime with toon shaders, is that when theyre still, they can look just like 2D. But when they move, you can tell its CGI. Its probably because that they lack the imperfections 2D has which in my opinion is much needed and can be quite appealing. AI has the potential to rectify this issue.

Also any 3D animation that simply lowers its frame rate is not replicating how 2D animation works. They're just making their animation choppy. 2D animation almost never feels choppy despite it being "lower fps". 2D animation typically works on 2s. So for ever 2 frames, theres 1 image. This can change dynamically over a shot. So it can go from being on 2s, to being animated on 4s, to then in some rare instances, being animated on 1s. The youtube link I provided does exactly this. (Go through the video using the < > keys to see where they animate on 1s, 2s, and even 4s) To recreate this effect in 3D, you basically have to animate in the same process as if you were animating using 2D.

The most painful way of doing it, is animating at your standard 24 fps getting a nice result, and then just lowering it to 12 fps and creating a janky mess. Its a lazy practice with bad outcomes in a desperate attempt to make it have a hand drawn feel.

My first sentence is that animators do not recreate 1:1 animation based on their video reference. They do not rotoscope over real life images, because you can create much better moving characters by just using irl movements as inspiration, but applying your own knowledge to create moving characters in a much more appealing way.

Im sorry, but I watched the full video on their other channel, and the way the characters move are cool, but weird. But I personally would never watch an anime with that type of movement unless the story was good. This is isnt an issue with flickering or anything. Recreating animation 1:1 with real footage is often just not appealing animation. Its like some weird motion capture 2D animation and can look uncanny.

And why do you think most animation studios don't use motion capture for 3D animation other than when they want to create realistic movement, like for a realistic video game or movie? The power to "replace animators" for 3D has existed for decades. Motion capture is pretty much perfected, its "cheap" and even then, they need animators to clean it up and make it more appealing. Most animation studios (in the category of Pixar, Sony image works, Fortiche, etc) dont use it because they want more stylized animation movements. Because to many its the most appealing type of animation.

Motion capture by small indie 3D animation studios is much more commonly used. But every time they get bigger, they phase that out and hire more hand keyed animators. Like Rooster Teeth and their RWBY franchise. This tech is basically exactly motion capture, but for 2D animation. And so will likely follow the same path. I do not ever see AI that basically rotoscopes over a video reference ever replacing 2D animators. Because thats not what they do.

Niko and Dean, the 2 main people coordinated everything and did a lot of heavy lifting, but it was a handful of Corridor folks as they mentioned they worked on that for months r/Corridor