@nintendoknife No. You've missed the point and have twisted my meaning.

It's not a matter of that they can't make the animations. It's a matter of the fact that each new kind of animation that is intended for all the Pokemon to use, explodes the scale of the animation department of the game alone. It's not only a matter of how long, it's also a matter of how many, with just the Pokemon alone.

Lets say Game Freak and Creatures Inc wanted at least 4 new in-battle animations, and 2-3 new overworld animations for every single Pokemon, as a hypothetical.

That alone is almost 7000+ new unique animations to be made, on just the Pokemon, and that includes the newly created ones for Sword and Shield, before you get to anything else. I have experience with both 3D and 2D animation (both unprofessionally) and from personal experience, and I can tell you depending on what the animation is, it could take multiple days to refine. I dunno how many people at Game Freak and Creature's combined are Artists (including 3D artists), but lets take a stab and say it's a flat 50, and lets say that maybe 25-35 of them are dedicated to animating the Pokemon's new animations, since the other 25-15 would probably be working on other things, including animations for environments and stuff.

For the majority of that time, the other artists would be focusing on their own stuff. It would take that team of 25-35 people, at one animation per day, around 200-240 days to do 7000 animations.

The man-days or man-hours aren't the only consideration here. There's also the budget allocated for just the animation that would explode.

Unfortunately for all of us however, the fact of the matter is that Game Freak's focus isn't entirely on Sword and Shield like it was for X and Y. They also have Town in the works along side it, which by itself is a big project, none of this of which is helped by TPC's shift to focusing on mobile thanks to GO's runaway success.

This is the other reason that Sword and Shield likely had Pokemon cut: it's all to reduce the workload on the people working on it, cause with a smaller staff allocated to Pokemon Sword and Shield, that means the man-hours required to give everyone what they want also explodes.

So going back to that earlier hypothetical, lets say that number of people who are 3D artists was slashed in half, being divided between Town and S&S. That means around 12-13 People are working on just the Pokemon now, now lets look at giving all those Pokemon 7000 shiny new animations. At a rate of 1 animations per day, between all of them, it comes out to ~538 or so days. More than a year, just on the Pokemon.

Of course this hypothetical doesn't take into account the fact those artists can probably get multiple animations done in a single day given their experience for some, but it would still take a very long time, probably a lot longer than Nintendo would like.

TL;DR : They could delay, and they could do it, but then TPC and Nintendo would probably get pretty angry at them. Not at all helped by what's probably them seeing their relevance to the brand slipping.

The only reason that Metroid Prime 4 got restarted and delayed was because they literally had nothing to show us and weren't (as far as we know) so far into development that they had to work with what they had or outright can the project. That isn't the case for Sword and Shield.

Nintendo and TPC will want the game out this year lest they end up having to release it later at a less ideal time (for Nintendo and TPC) rather than keeping to their word and losing face.