Just saw Wolf Children. Besides Eva 3.0 overall, this is the 2012 film I liked best, and in terms of animation etc. it easily takes the top cake imo. Maybe the character animation is not on the same level as Momo e no Tegami, but the storyboarding and directing more than make up for it. Okiura is I think, first and foremost an animator. You can tell the difference in the focus on certain technical aspects. Hosoda is first and foremost a director and storyteller. The stuff we see better supports the content of the film.
One thing that struck me is that there are a lot of montages in Wolf Children. A lot. And they really make you realise how film itself, the images themselves can be used to tell a story. The story follows a relatively long narrative of more than a decade. One method would've been to simply use timeskips. But the montages work so much better as a means to transition from one period of time to the other. They're not just some gateway from time A to time B. They also show the develoopment in the story, and in the characters.
Also the storyboarding was fantastic. One non-spoilerfic example (although there are at least 3 scenes that go above and beyond with this kind of subtle visual storytelling) is when Ame visits a wolf at the local zoo/center with his mother, because they were eager to learn more about being a wolf, how they mature and so on and so forth, and every scene that takes place here shows the bars of the cage. That's a tiny visual cue that shows and tells so much. Whenever they are in that room, it's always a back-front or front-back view separated (usually) in the middle by the cage-bars. Even when the "camera" focuses on the wolf or one of the characters up close, it's still through the bars, always. Very simple but very effective layout.
The film also uses CG very well, and it is perhaps the first one where character CG (for the crowds) wasn't all too jarring (more recently there were CG crowds in the Blood-C film as well for example, and those stand out pretty badly imo). There are scenes where you notice but also scenes where it strucks you after the fact. There is this scene where the kids all rush out of the classrooms for example, and at first I didn't realise it was CG. If they do it more like Hosoda does it, I would not mind seeing this kind of shortcutting and costcutting more often, even though I will always prefer traditional animation. Again speaking of CG, backgrounds this time, the scene where the 3 run through the forest in the snow was pretty impressive, and I kinda think that it wouldn't have looked as good with traditional background animation.
As for interesting animation cuts, besides the ones that were previously mentioned, the film is generally full of them. I remained with the scenes where Ame and Yuki run around, and when they fight in various instances. Again, not just because they were very nicely animated, but also because they follow a very clear pattern which serves the narrative in its entirety.