How to do video animations without using desktop software?

Have you ever done an animation using Flash? If your answer is 'Yes' then you know how many hard times you had to face when you did your first animation with Flash. I know I'm also one of them who actually found it very difficult to produce a meaningful or a cartoon type animation.

Well, those days it was sort of fun type of thing even it was not easy to make animations with Flash.
To produce a better animation apart from making rotating banners for websites, it requires lot of Action Script code to do so.