I have this image that I created, from hand drawn, scan in Gimp, vectorized/colorized in Inkscape, them rasterized in Gimp. I brought it back into inkscape and cut out all the parts, then imported the image as plane, so that all the small sections are their own plane.
It was a longer process than planned! But I’m happy to have gone trough it! Now, I would like to animate it. The first thing would be the water.
I can take one ‘wave section’ at a time and animate it, create a keyframe at the beginning one at the end, and a few in between to have a wave going up and down to create a loop. But I feel there should be something more ‘automated’ where I can use maybe physics / wind / fluid / particle ? and have the plane moving as if they would move if a wind was blowing in a direction? I have no idea how to approach this. I want the ‘wave section’ to stay like a cut out piece of paper, like old animation style 
So I am not looking into cloth deformation for example…
Any help in what direction I should take would be greatly appreciated!
edit: This is the kind of animation that inspires me that I would like to emulate somehow: