Stop Motion.

Stop motion animation is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen. Where other types of animation look for shortcuts to make the process easier, stop motion purposefully makes every single frame of film a painstaking process.
Stop motion animators create everything you see. Some CGI may be used nowadays to round out the process, but they still move the characters by hand.  The animators set a scene, take a picuture, move the "doll" very slightly, take another picture. They repeat this process endlessly so when they run the pictures together at high speed the doll looks to be moving and emoting.
Regular animation is a painstaking process as it is. It used to be every cell drawn by hand. The same way stop motion works. Computer animation helps make the monotony out of it by being able to tell the computer on a grid where to move the point too. But this adds as much as it takes away by placing the emphasis on math and geometry and not art.
But there's something elegant about creating everything in three dimensions, practically. Then moving all of your work by hand to achieve the desired effect. Its all about the artist and his creation.

In this clip of the new Wallace and Gromit commercial you can see how they create everything you see. I'm always surprised at the size of the puppets. They really need to make them big to get the detail they want.