Animation what makes it so great? Literally what type of program.

I assume your talking about the 3d type of animation so I am going to go withthat. In most commercial productions, the software used is "Maya". The learning curve on this is pretty steep. but even lower end 3d software takes a bit of learning, it isn't something one sits down to and on the first day creates a movie. There is a lot to it. Now, bear in mind it is more than just a matter of a person sitting down to a computer and creating an animated movie. This takes teams of people and thousands of hours. There are teams that concentrate specificly on the environment (terrain, sky, scenery), teams that work only on certain character design. There are teams that focus only on textures, other teams that actualy animate the character models, there are teams that work only on objects, teams that only work on particle systems (rain, snow, fire, smoke), there are teams that only concentrate on lighting systems, etc, you get the idea. Then there is the process of rendering. This is the process of taking all the animation sequences and "render" them to the final digital format for transfer to film. Rendering is very time intensive, a single minute of fully animated and textured movie can take an hour on a single computer. Rendering is generaly done on banks of computers networked together. I use a software program called "Cinema 4d". It has also been used in commercial productions, such as the spiderman movies. I have been using it for years and have gotten pretty comfortable with it. Another popular and good piece of software is called "Studio 3d max", it isn't quite as smooth an interface as cinema 4d is, but it is still a good one. there are free programs out there for this, such as "blender", an open source 3d creation, animation and game creation package, but I found it more difficult then the one I currently use, but then I am so used to mine that it was probably handicapping me, for someone just starting out, it may be just fine.