i've found that it's quite hard to get cartoony looks with any kind of dynamics, since the shapes are never as clean as you'd like them to, and also the motion is hard to control and to give it a cartoony timing. but mograph and fields in combination with the volume builder to the rescue, you can do a lot with those, the main issue is that either you end up with really dense geometry, that make things a bit slow, or you do a lot of smoothing with the smoothing deformer at the cost of some jittering, which might be ok if the overall motion is fast enough anyways. i do have a couple of tutorials on cineversity about the topic, one also contains an explosion.
here are some examples of what you can do, all of them are without any dynamics, and except for a very few without particles, pure mograph and deformer solutions.