I second this suggestion although I would suggest to use any decent 3D package that you can get your hands on, Maya 3DS Max, Lightwave have all had a long history as being used for making things for games, even if they are 2D games.

There are plenty of 3D models on the internet that you can use, e.g. a pirate boat. You can put together some sensible lighting, e.g. with some fill, a key light, some ambient level or just one glowing thing in the sky, and, from that you can get some sensible shadows, highlights and subtlety to the colours that are flat in your source model.

If you want an effect remember that 3D has been used for cartoons for a very long time, there are plenty of plugins and some don't need aeons to learn and master.

If you want to have the boat explode you can animate that and tweak the animation until you have it looking good. It is not like you have a set of drawings to manually tweak.

Depending on how far you have taken the style (e.g. cartoon plugins) it then becomes a matter of rendering to get your finished bitmaps.

But why stop there? Once you think in 3D it becomes intuitive to do a game that way and use existing libraries for things like collision detection.