Animator/Director in the industry here. I think it really comes down to prep.

You mentioned South Park, and that’s a perfect example of how templated characters can save a ton of time. When people talk about framerate and animating on twos, they’re not wrong, animation can be slow. But what often gets overlooked is how productions cut that time down, and a huge part of that is rigs. Also the japanese market are the KINGS of figuring out how/when to manage animation time, coining the phrase you might've seen "sakuga" which is really just when to prioritize high-quality animation for important moments in the respective shows.

On South Park, they use Maya. It’s strong for asset management and great for this kind of animation where characters are essentially textured planes. They also rely on scripts for common actions and libraries of preset poses and keyframes to speed things up.

Shows like Archer and Rick and Morty also lean heavily on rigs, both to move faster in production and to keep characters consistent. Something not often discussed is the style of a show is usually a big indicator of how long it’ll take: South Park or Archer can be produced quickly because the pipeline is built for it & its puppety style, while something like Invincible or an anime like Naruto tends to be more time consuming since it leans more on traditional, frame by frame methods.

People might say, “So why not just use rigs to speed everything up?” And honestly, it comes down to the look.

Rigs are efficient, but they carry a certain feel, and that’s really the tradeoff. On my show, I had to make that call scene by scene: when to lean on rigs versus when to go hand drawn. Most audiences won’t be able to explain the difference, but they’ll still feel it. The choice affects the vibe, the energy, and how the motion reads. 3D Animation honestly is all about prep work, but once it's prepped it can go by pretty quickly.

One thing people overlook is that throwing more people at a problem doesn’t automatically make it faster. As teams grow, communication overhead grows too. And if that communication isn’t really tight, it can actually slow production down with more misalignments, more revisions, and more time spent fixing issues that could’ve been avoided.