>>37013851No, the problem isn't that hydro pump has a particular animation, it's that GF didn't animate Mega blastoise "ranged attack" action to utilize its cannons at all. For lots of pokemon, the Ranged Attack animation is the same as the Status Move animation. For others, they have a status animation, a ranged animation, and a melee animation, with other animations depending on what move they use, like Greninja having a special animation for using Water Shuriken. Water Shuriken has the same animation regardless of who uses it, but the game assigns a special animation to Greninja when it is the user of the move.
That's the problem. There's no good way for Blastoise to be animated shooting one beam out of two cannons so complaining about Blastoise not using them for Ice beam or whatever is pointless. As explained, there is an easy, demonstrable way to animate MEGA Blastoise doing so, but GameFreak doesn't do it because they'd rather sell Mew to people for 50 dollars