I'm going to give a quick overview of what is in the creative suite 5 series

Adobe Dreamweaver (Web Design)
Adobe Flash Professional (Animation)
Adobe After Effects (Video Effects)
Adobe Premiere (Video Editing)
Adobe Photoshop (Photo Editing)
Adobe Media Encoding (Encoding Media)
Adobe Soundbooth (Sound editing)

Flash as i just mentioned is all about making animations and like all of the cs5 software it makes the claim of being simple and easy to use, for once a claim that i heartingly agree with.

It offers a wide variety of tools to make animation easy for every person. Either you can animate frame by frame with a lot of patience or with a bit more expertise you can use the bone tool to animate little sequences in a flash.

I have used it in graphic art classes before and it was one of the only pieces of software that everyone could understand.

In fact i only have two main criticisms of the software. One the price tag £150 for one license, really, for me this is the big turn off and this kind of links onto my next point. Its very hard to edit graphics on this so you really should by fireworks if you're going to be using this for any serious work