What is a really good animation program?

What is a good animation program for beginners?

• I am interested in 2-D animation and I was wondering if anyone could show me good animation program for beginners. I would like a program that is either free or cheap because I don't want to invest too much and find out that I don't like it. If you can also tell me about some videos that would help with the program you suggested that would be great. P.S. Thank you for answering.

• Answer:

  Usually something like Flash or Toon Boom is great but are usually costly. There is a freeware program called Pencil that works just fine and mimics traditional animation. I use it from time to time and is pretty good. http://www.pencil-animation.org/ Synfig Is pretty much Pencil on steroids but still isn't as complex as something like tvpaint or toon boom. http://www.synfig.org/cms/ Plastic Paper is also pretty good. Mimics controls of autodesk sketchbook. so if you are familiar with that this is good. http://plasticanimationpaper.dk/ CreaToon is kind of on the lower end of performance but still gets the job done. www.creatoon.com Flip Book is good because it has a side by side xsheet. http://www.digicelinc.com/flipbook.htm Monkey jame is a simpler version of flipbook http://monkeyjam.org/ All of these are free and behave just the way they should without dropping hundreds of dollars on a software or thousands of dollars on a suite.