That's generally because they animate on "3's" instead of "1's" and "2's," like we do out west. 3's means---3 frame holds per drawing.
Since the human eye sees 24 frames (or in this case, drawings) per second, animation on 3's looks slower, since it's about 8 pictures per second. Typical TV animation in America is on 2's--12 pictures per second, while Disney 2D feature animation is on 1's--24 pictures per second. I know Akira was done on 1's, and was one of the first Japanese feature animations to actually do proper lip-synch.
You'll also find that anime has much lower budgets than we do out here, and they end up saving their money for the action, not the drama. Since anime stems mainly from manga (comics,) they stage their action accordingly--all the smoother animation is saved for the equivalent of their splash screens, or the big action set pieces. Dialogue scenes tend to have more still images with barely any animation in them.
As a lover of art and creativity in general, it's hard for me to hate on an entire genre or style. There's something to be gleaned from damned near anything, and so long as it's cool and has some appeal, I'm there.
