Sometimes going back to traditional animation gives better and juicy results

Finally, last weekend I found myself with lot of things to animate, now that the framework is almost ready and mostly working except for the audio module that is only half implemented. I decided to re-take again the juicy part, which is to make the eye candy and character movement so I can test if the framework works as expected.

A week ago, when talking about juicy things that make your game looks better I found Juice it or lose it video, and how to make simple things look better by adding small animations, or small things that give more feedback to the player and make the game experience a experience of the 21st century based on 20th century technology. So I decided to animate the Cat's character tail that was a static 2d sprite with springs simulation to wave it but it didn't look nice enough for me, so I tried different 3d and 2d techniques without much success, I couldn't make it look good enough given the time I wanted to spend on it, so doing it in 3d requires a lot of work modeling and animating all the vertices the way I wanted, and 2d polygons do not deform very well with a shape like a tail, so after a few tries I decided to go back to the traditional frame by frame animation, and make about a dozen frames like the picture below.

You can check the progress in this video from a very rought sketch to a clean final animation.

I am still wondering if I can make a 2d patch deformed polygon that can show 2d textures with appropiate deformation and corrected perspective in 2d, but so far I haven't been able to find a good way to do it without having to invest a lot of time and effort, given that, 2d traditional animation seems to be the right path in this case.