Animation is not terribly hard, per se. It is just that doing animation is time consuming and requires some practice. The reason why you do not see very many people around you doing animation is in the tediousness. So unless you have a burning passion in telling the kinds of micro stories that animation requires, then most likely even a few minute long animation is too much work.
Animation does get easier as you progress into the tools. But at the starting point of the learning curve there is no real shortcuts. There is just so much that you need to learn. Timing, storytelling, rigging, scripting, drawing, interpolating, techniques, physics etc etc. So before you begin I suggest you watch:
As for software. You could try any of:
- After Effects
- Toonboom Harmony
- Flash (Adobe Animate)
- Sketchbook Pro
- Photoshop
- any 3d animator Blender, Maya, 3dsMax
Of these flash and AE is mostly easiest to get into if your used to adobe stack.
Note you will pretty soon realize that there is a HUGE learning curve not because the software are basically hard. But because the no learning curve workflow is so damn tedious that it is easier to do nearly anything else instead. Learning more is almost impossible to avoid. A few expressions can make animating for 12 hours a 5 minute job.
If you know what your doing then you can even animate in illustrator Ive sometimes done so, because I can.
If you want to be on the extremely low end of animation consider:
Power Point or other presentation applications they are both easy to use and most likely have no extra overhead as you know how to use them. They are limited sure, but easy to get into.
Not that something like Flash or Maya is harder its just that most people know how to use power point.
