No longer are expensive cameras and stacks of drawing paper needed to complete a vision of animated character. For a few hundred bucks we can strive to join the ranks of Pixar or Disney and create our own animated film. With this freedom however we often forget that the computer like everything else that appears to save us time can create as many problems as it solves. As easy as it is to find a cheap and suitable animation package, it's just as easy to set a few keys frames.
Animation is the study of motion and emotion.
It's creating a convincing character that the audience loves or hates. The computer allows animators to do this very well as evidenced by some of the great computer animated films and characters that have come out in the last few years. But not surprisingly the ease at which artists can make characters move is creating a lot of animation that lacks those necessary qualities that makes animation great. As many of you know, when we set keyframes in our animation software the program interpolates the actions between them. We can set a few poses then hit the render button and everything is moving around.