Jake of the Web

Dave Motta asked about animation software for his son to use in a school project:

The one I liked the most was Dog Waffle:

http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/free/

It had excellent tutorial videos - http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/tuts/DanCDtutes/index.html

A great application for animating scanned images created on paper is MonkeyJam:

http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam/

Another very good application is 'Beneton Movie GIF' - http://software.benetonfilms.com/Beneton_Movie_GIF/