>>45113847>having to pay more hours of work to draw more cels for the same productThat is mostly correct. Paying people a living wage is considerably costly, and animation studios sometimes have dozens or even hundreds of animators working at all hours of the day. There's also the cost of the physical object in question. Transparent cels, paint, etc. all cost money. Going back to man-hours, imagine you're an animator and your daily work load is dropped off at the beginning of your day. Which would take you less time to complete, a stack of animation cels or a stack of animation cels where some scenes contain four times as many cels? Obviously the one with more cels. Time spent on the unneeded cels is time not spent on furthering the project's completion, and so work becomes more expensive for the studio.