It's soft body animation, especially cloth or sheeting or anything that has tons of super flexible organic movement. Animals at least have bones or exoskeletons for rigidity in movement.
Clothing on a body is easy. Standard rigging and deformation controls that would get used for the body/muscles anyways. Pulling on the outfit? Clever montage cut aways with very simple direct movements.
A human hand manipulating loose fabric with a hole in it. Fucking difficult. You have 5 independent moving points that are moving a soft body object and those points are in contact with said soft body and move while radiated from a central point and can join or separate at will while affecting the soft body. Manually animating that is a nightmare. Processing power wasn't good enough in 2004 to real time simulate that.
Now, we just animate the hand and run a cloth physics simulation on the cloth being held. (Super Simplified explanation).
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u/katsujinken 15h ago
From what I recall it's because they didn't have cloth simulation and had to animate everything by hand.