As of March 26th, 2016, the animation software behind Studio Ghibli films (since Princess Mononoke), Futurama, Balto, and a whole bunch of other notable shows and films is now free and open source on Github under the New BSD license. They're already plenty of tutorials out there to get started with on YouTube since it's released. I'm gonna fiddling with this a lot. P.S. As of the initial 1.0 release, they're some reports that it's a little crashy on Windows, and a tad rough around the edges. 1.0.1 should fix the issues.
To be fair, I'm still learning the software. I had to redo the interface to my ideal specs in order to get this simple animation done. This is by no means Adobe Flash Pro/Animate which is far simpler by comparison.
Well, if you want to see my actual animation skills with the same software... And I was, like, 18. I'll admit the ending is a little cheesy.
im certain any average joe could take a stab at this with a good pen. although, good pens these d ays are a little hard to come by because i threw out all my pens i don't know where they are