is there any way to deform meshes or meta balls to make cartoony characters?
Yes, with bones (armatures) or lattices. You have to convert meta shapes to meshes first, thou.
sry, i mean before animation. is there any way to change the shape of meshes or meta balls to make cartoony hands , etc?
Yes, the same mechanisms that apply for non-toony characters.
doesnt you just model it catoony???
I have been slowly writing a tutorial on toon anatomy, so if you’ll be patient, there will eventually be a resource. In the meanwhile just think in terms of pears and kidney beans.
Put together some meta shapes, convert to meshe and do some point editing (amybe with proportional editing turned on, to move many points at once).
What about parenting them to lattices and deforming the lattices?
http://blenderchar.weirdhat.com/latticetute1/
Just a thought