I'm not sure what "Animated sub-line scrolling" is but "smooth scrolling" returned a lot of hits:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/4160949

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmoothScrolling

http://zwell.net/content/emacs.html

https://emacs.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/smooth-scrolling/

Yes, trying to do fancy things in Elisp can be a bit kludgy.