I would honestly have to say people are overestimating how much it would cost to commission somebody to do an animated cutscene.
A lot of graphic designers who are considered big time or such will generally over charge for their work. I do not mean rip off but more that they set their price points far above what they would be if they weren't considered successfull but their level of skill remained the same.
Yes if you want animated cutscenes for your entire game you better have a deep wallet but if all you need is an intro (ie 1 cutscene) it is not a crazy amount (certainly not bank breaking).
The opening cutscene for Dragon Quest IX, for example, is roughly a minute and a half (around abouts anyways). Now the amount of frames per second in that cutscene is roughly (again, not exact) ranging from 15-30. Let's say for arguements sake that it is 15. That is 1200 frames total. Now depending on how many different shots your cutscene has, most of that 1200 is a slight modification of the last image (ie, the actual animation aspect of the entire process). The more shots the more "unique" pictures that have to be made and hence the more work the cutscene will be.
Now lets say for arguements sake you want a quick 30 second intro that is just there to be flashy and pretty and stuff (nothing too in depth or technical), so 450 frames. In this intro you would most likely want your logo either throughout or right at the end, now for anybody who has commissioned a logo or title screen background before would know they are (generally speaking) not expensive, especially if it is for non-commercial use. If you already have the title screen background or logo ready then that is roughly 1/4 of the work done for the animator. Now let's say you want the cutscene to be like this: black screen, shield fades in at centre of the screen, sword spins clockwise and is moving from top left to centre meeting behind the shield with the tip pointing to the bottom right, another sword mirroring the first on the other side of the screen, background fades to a paning shot of a kingdom, finish. Fading in of the shield is easy and it does not need to be redrawn for each frame so only 1 shield is needed to be drawn. Only 1 sword needs to be drawn since it will be copied and mirrored and rotating of the sword does not nescicarily need re-drawing (depends on art style and how the graphic artist handles shadeing). The black background is obviously not time consumeing and neither is the fading of it away. The paning of the kingdom shot is probably the most time consuming as the image has to actually be drawn to be larger than the screen size to allow for the paning. Now if the animator is also the graphical artist then the process will be atleast 1.5x longer if not 2x but that is cheaper (by roughly 25-50%) than having a seperate animator and artist but having the two seperate people will make the process faster. Now this is quite a simple example and depending on the quality of the artwork (which is one of the larger factors in the cost) not a largely costly thing, you might have to pay a few hundred dollars for an average/above average art quality 30 second cutscene but it is nowhere near thousands of dollars.
I mean I could probably make what I wrote in the example and show what the end result would be for an average-ish level of artwork cutscene (still working on getting better and graphics but I would say I am at the very least average). That is assuming anybody is interested in seeing what it would look like.
