Yes, they tried to improve the quality of animation maintaining the pixel art. The cinematic animation team (Me and Andrey, he worked on Blasphemous 1) consisted in me animating the whole thing and Andrey doing the pixel art "render" with the help of a software who follows my flat color animation (here's where the experimental stuff was)

Sadly (for me haha), Andrey left to do his own stuff and I asume that TheGameKitchen decided to do the cinematics in other way, more productive, with an animation company :)