How do I make an animation?

I want to make an animation. I used to use Pivot to make Stick animations but I want to move up from that. I wanna make something kinda like this a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvjZ6VkLuCM." rel="nofollow"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvjZ6VkLu…/a What programs should I use? How do I do it? Any tips?