I was curious about how difficult it would be to get into basic animation in Adobe After Effects, and here is the very meagre fruit of my labor. I began by creating a vector drawing of a piglet in Adobe Illustrator, with every body part of the pig designed on a different layer, and then I imported that file into Adobe After Effects. This image is of the skeletal structure of the piglet made using the Duik plugin for Adobe AE, with the idea being that if you attach the right body parts to the right skeletal structure, you can animate the movement of the character.
This second image is of the complete skeletal rigging and adjustments made to the positioning of the legs. I can already see that my design has problems that severely limit the usable range of motion, because if I move a leg too much then parts which shouldn't show start bulging out of the body.
This is probably as far as I'll take this since I don't want to start over from scratch, but it gives some idea of what can be done with the wide world of software available to us.
This image really starts to show the outline deforming, as well as the unnaturalness of the movement.
I'm using the level 3 forum because this isn't really related to Epicureanism, but as Cassius always says it's good to try and keep abreast of these tools.