hmmm. which is best? that is tough but to give you my honest opinion, I have to say Newtek's Lightwave3D for sure. intuitive menus which are most important to me, and the manual is very thorough yet simple of a read. also for "toon" animation there is a plug in that turns your 3d models into a cartoon animation so pretty easy all in all. best of all are the options to export models and scenes as virtual reality (.wrl) files. and if you are designing for cad it works in that arena as well.
I think the most important thing you will need though is some one with hands on experience that you can sit down with and learn the basics because with basics you can easily advance your skills but lacking them cuts you out of the running to do anything more advanced at all. If you do use Lightwave3D just remember that ctrl+D freezes metanurb meshes as you will need it for any sort of organic modeling you do. (use the tab button to get a unfrozen meta nurb.
(I posted a picture of a unnurbed and a nurbed object so you could see what I was talking about (also study the short cuts to what ever program you go for as they will save you hours of wasted time and stress)

i think the best for simple animation (like text moving) program is photoshop/imageready
i'm using them to make animation, and i'm happy