Like Marian sais in the peek of the week:
And making 2D animations do take a lot of time in comparison to animations with 3D characters. With 2D characters you have to draw all the animations piece by piece, and for each direction. With 3D characters you "only" have to make the animations with the use of skeleton animation.
Don't make a mistake here. The type of skeletal animation is the same for <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> and <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" />. The only differences are the polygon count of the model, the Necessity to render it out for 2D in all Directions (8 for a monster, 16 for the hero) and the limitation of the framecount for 2D.
