A few embedded YouTube videos that aren't theirs with some text around it and I'm supposed to turn on tracking so they can make some money? The link should be directly to YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs7WaL44_Iw.

This is what blogs do. It's a valid thing, even if you don't value this one. I tend to find their curation useful, when I happen across them. And tracking is optional...

Might be worth having a look at Oliver Postgate's work (Smallfilms was the name of the company) if you like this stuff. There is a modest touring exhibition of Postgate's artwork and equipment going around the UK at the moment. The early stuff was cutout, later stop motion.

Amazing what you can do when there’s no DRM and anti-circumvention laws and everything you want to do is fair use

Is there a library for this? Import images, give each Z layer value, adjust their rotation/scale/position each frame? Curious to see what the SouthPark guys use which seems very similar but more digital.

If you literally mean "library", then any rendering library will do just fine after you build the animation system. If you're looking for a program then After Effects or Flash (now Adobe Animate) are two options. The features that you've described are the base functionality of any animation program.

Here's an old article breaking down South Park's process: https://www.quora.com/What-software-does-South-Park-use-to-a...

South Park started very lo-fi and later began to "emulate" the crappiness of the old system, by rendering silhouette shadows to make them look like paper cutouts. Fun!

...but they turned into a computer-based 3D animation system that's used in a 2.5D way to mimic paper cutout animation soon thereafter...

Shameless plug - I have a startup for that: http://www.superanimo.com

The whole point of my site is to allow anyone to "create your own SouthPark." The animations are crappy, you can use cutouts and gifs and everything is spritesheets that you can rotate/scale/position.

There are a lot of animation platforms on the web, but I think SuperAnimo is unique. Everyone else focuses on "explainer videos" for your business, or "whiteboard animations." My site is for fun. It's also my favorite project to work on so hopefully someday I can work on it full time.

There are numerous software packages that do this, it's called compositing and is ubiquitous in film and TV production. After Effects is the go-to commercial package, Blender is a fine open-source alternative.

Blender would work very well for this.

What about copyrights for those cut-outs?

Reminds me of trying to make a Python foot like page transition as part of my learn js efforts. You have to click the 'click me' by the title and it may or may not work https://tim333.github.io/

If you were to meet Terry today (a friend is a personal friend) one would have no idea the stately man you're introduced was that long haired counter culture vanguard. Seeing him "in character" in that video is almost shocking if you know him now.