Did you ever find a solution? If not here is my 2 cents worth. Lightwave 3d has nice plugin called cell shader. It converts 3D scenes to appear 2D and it does a good job. It also lets you adjust your settings i.e. line thickness and others. Thisway you could have the 3D rotation effect of the crane but still have it appear 2D.
Also I would suggest ImageFX Studio by Nova Designs, the latest is version 4.5. This paint image manipulation package is second to none and rivals other similar programs on other platforms.
The batch processor alone makes it worth it. You could paint the hand drawn style you are looking for in the program or draw each frame and scan them in. Then use the batch program to assemble them into an animation.
finally Lightwave 3D allows you to composite videos into the background so you could combine the two elements.
