Special moves use Wii Sports/Wii Fit equipment. Hula Hoops for the recovery, spiking a ball. The unique animations do stand on their own too, imo. All a lot of characters have ever done is hit people with their body.
Yeah, it is true that a great number of characters' standards are basically reduced to "hit with their body"... mostly, all we've seen of her movements are
very straightforward attacks where she suddenly appears in a certain pose and deals damage once. Functionally, she's as straightforward of a character as we've seen, even more so than the average "move to hit people with their body".
Have we seen specifically what the hula hoops do? As far as I could tell, they did some damage and then she jumped away.
I'm holding out hope for her other specials, though. And, I'm hoping that the ball special is a volleyball spike downward in the air and a soccer kick upwards on the ground. I don't think we have a projectile that always moves at an angle like that yet, and I've always enjoyed angled projectiles like ROB's.