What do animators do

3d animation or 2d animation?

I can shed some light on 3D animation. Typically at a company there are different teams. For there is a modeling team which includes a texture artist, an animation team and a special effects team. The modeling team only creates the 3d models or characters. They are in charge of polygon count for reat time gaming, hierarchy with and animation set up. Setting things up for inverse kenetics, and or forward kenetics. They get everything ready for the animation process. They are also teamed with a texture artist or manager. The texture artist is responsible for creating the texture maps that are added to the models, things like clothing, hair, skin, tiled walls etc.

Once the models are all set and looking good, its the animators team to animate the characters. They use storyboards from the preproduction team to keep the animation on target, and also work with the audio production team to keep everything synched up. They use blocking to hit their targets. The animation team is truely the production team.

So from concept, storyboards, and model set up along with background creations (not mentioned previously) is all preproductions.
Animation, Audio, lighting, camera views are all productions.
and special effects are post production.

Post Production is the clean up crew, they square away all of the special effects and editing. They add in the credits and the intro.

personlly I'm a fan of prepro and post more than production. It takes a more techincal person who doesn't mind living within 30 seconds for a week or two.