I am an animation artist. You may want to read some of the animation books by Eric Goldberg, Richard Williams, Preston Blair, or Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, if you want to go into character animation.
And yes, I too am annoyed by how long it takes to have an enjoyable, healthy animation career. Any of those processes (hand-drawings, CG, stop-motion) seem to take so long to produce that I'm convinced the field functions on another plane of existence where time slows down by %1000! It's like you can't make any mistakes once you are on the job, or you will regret it decades later.
If you want to go into animation, you better be prepared to love and hate the job at the same. Shota's right, you've got to live, breath and feel animation to be happy with it for a career.
The good news is that if you can't do careful detail, well, you don't really need to. I mean, look at the most successful cartoons in the business - Simpsons? Adventure Time? Family Guy? How detailed are those cartoons? You don't need to draw with detail to get a job animating those shows. I'd still say it's helpful to be able to do it, but it's fathomable to build a career in cartooning without understanding complex realism at all. Rod Scribner himself couldn't draw realistically to save his life, or so I'm told.
edited 23rd Sep '11 3:27:30 PM by DrDepo

Personally, there are just so many questions I have about getting into 2D animation and what it's like, but extremely few resources. I mean, it's by pure luck that I even know about CAL Arts. There's certainly no list of best animation schools listed on the internet (that I could find anyway) and it's so hard to figure out the professional process without taking classes on it.
And, I mean, I really love cartoons. And I love figuring things out and all my favorite art is in loose quick sketches, and I like studying movement and how our body moves when we shrug our shoulders or lean back on our heels in thought. But tedious things frustrate me, wasting time frustrates me. Careful detail frustrates me, and the kind of art you see in museums is so far out of my understanding that I'd get really nervous if I ever had to do one of those swirly vortexes of color that are suppose to represent something deep, because I just don't get it.
Is there a job or place for a person like me in the animation world? Because it seems like what animation requires is detail, patience, (virtue, temperance, fortitude... etc.) I guess maybe story boarding is the only job in the process that I can think of that would be different... (but of course, I don't really know anything) Would you have to go to school for animation to branch into that, or concentrate on some other major..?
Also, any resources or links at all would be extremely helpful. Thank you for your time!