Shrinking & growing effects

[Runouw]

I propose we make it so Mario spins very fast and appears mostly as a "motion blur" (as seen here in Swing Bros), with the character being thrown only having a single, blurred sprite that is just spun around Mario's spinning animation (which has a couple more frames as to not have it look like a total cop-out). This would require minimal effort and probably look OK ingame.

Yes, we can always use tricks like this, I'd say it's definitely worth it to save the effort of redrawing all of the characters being swung at different angles.
Similar tricks can be done to the other attacks. Especially ones that aren't very common.
But I think there also needs to be certain standard animations that all of the characters need to have, mostly for very common motions like swinging an item. For instance, Home-run bat, beam-sword, and lipstick all use very similar motions. Only the item would need to be replaced, the character would use the same frames for all 3 items.
Same goes for the hammer and golden hammer.