2D animation is the art of creating movement in a two-dimensional space. This includes characters, creatures, FX and backgrounds. The illusion of movement is created when individual drawings are sequenced together over time. This allows artists to save on production time/costs and gives 2D animation its unique look.

Traditional 2D animation is simple by design but very time-consuming, but 3D animation can be smooth or quite complicated as well. For instance, if you want to animate a 3D ball bouncing in a simple scene, you can set up the ball and ground plane’s physics and dynamic attributes in a few short steps.