Automatoon is a free service for creating simple to complex animations that you can reuse anywhere on the web.  There are three basic steps to using Automatoon.  First, you draw and color your images.  Second, you break apart each element of your drawing and third, you specify the animation action for each part of your drawing.  There are three basic animation actions that you can specify:  bend, move and change.  Automatoon uses HTML5  so you what you create can be view on devices like the iPad 2 that doesn’t support Flash. 

Here is a video tutorial on creating animations using Automatoon.