An animation I like is "Billy's Balloon" by an animator I like named Don Hertzfeldt. He draws everything frame by frame, though, but I can see how most of it can be done with Flash. Since he drew everything frame by frame, his animations are jittery. He could have achieved the same effect by redrawing each different item 3-5 times and setting each set of 3-5 frames as a symbol.
I like the jittery effect. It tells you that something is not right. There are many long pauses in between actions. Having a long pause with the jittery effect is very good for adding suspense. It also works well as a foreshadow that something really bad is going to happen, like when Billy sees another toddler in the air.
All the toddlers look similar, and some even exactly the same, so if Hertzfeldt were to use Flash, he could have just made the main toddler into a symbol, then create new instances of it, and resized it. Same with the balloons, except he would also have to rotate them and change the color. He could have also copied the image of the toddler inside the symbol and then pasted it in a new symbol to add hair and clothes for the different toddlers. Also, the movement of Billy and the balloons could have easily been done in a minute on Flash with tweening.
The toddlers have big round eyes. Well, it's common for toddlers to have big round eyes, which makes them cute, and this animation only featured toddlers. In another Don Hertzfeldt animation, called "Rejected," you can see that other adult characters have big round eyes just like the toddlers in Billy's Balloon. You can compare them to the toddlers; as simpletons. His characters' eyes are usually either big and round or are little dots, or in other words: unusual.
There is a lot of empty space around the characters in Hertzfeldts animations. It helps to show how little the characters matter. It works well with how they are simpletons, how they get hurt a lot, and how they say or do something really unusual/shocking but funny. They seem more disposable with a lot of empty space.
Hertzfeldt's style tells the viewers that the animations are going to be unusual. It makes the animations more funny when there are long pauses while everything is shaky. In our world, our pauses would be stationary, but in his it's crazy and jittery.
