Thanks for the advice! I plan on doing that next time!
For the art stack, not get to into specifics but I use an Illustrious anime model (checkpoint) from CivitAi, just find a model you like and/or add on any additional style loras you want, I use Invoke but have used ForgeUI in the past to generate the pictures. For the animation, I use comfyui to use Wan (2.1/2.2) to animate the pictures generated from Invoke/ForgeUI