One of the biggest giveaways that things are 3d for me is how the shadows fall and wrap across a surface and they've done a pretty good job here - there's some lovely shaders in softimage developed by the guy that produced the animatrix and tekkonkinreet anime and used by ghibli that uses vertex maps to control how shadows…
I too fapped endlessly over this. For the looks, I just cant believe that this is a simple 'good toon shader'. There's no way to emulate anime in 3d without morphing the model based on camera angle to create the kinds of highlights and cast shadows that are usually hand painted in anime. As for the motion everything looks…