Question About Simple Animation Effects

what is the fastest and easiest way to do such a simple 2D animation like the one attached?

Videos like these are usually made using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects. You start by drawing your lines and shapes in Illustrator, import them to After Effects and use Masking or Path Trim, according to the required technique for your video, in addition to other Effects or Plugins you might need.The easier and faster way is to use an online animation website that are built to make things easier specially if you’re not a designer or don’t have design or animation skill. You may still need to have some basic knowledge about Adobe Illustrator at least or a similar package. Websites like Powtoon, GoAnimate, and Videoscribe, there are more websites but those are the ones I remember for now. You may be a bit constrained with the options and presets these websites offer but they can still save the day. They are not as flexible as After Effects.That’s my idea on how to create a video in that style, I hope this was helpful to you.

I want to make simple animated 2D shorts from my home like this video. How can I do this?

helloo.. by the time i write this, you may forgoten this question, forsaken your inner desire to do it and move on with your life, or achieve to do it. but i still gonna give opinion as greenie animator, who know this will help our comrades out there. to me, i may use photoshop, flash and after effects. and any sound editing softwares. using low fps, draw shape and few set of slight different shape lines on top of it and make use of loop symbols for the cat to make it look like constant frame to frame draw. background and props from photoshop, separate animated and still parts like trees and sea. for sea, i think enough with few set of brush stroke contain of highlight, shade and base color. copy and group few of it in line, copy the line and stack them to fill your screen and each of the line randomly, slightly move and tilt it till you saw waving waves. and put masked swimming cat on top with splash effects. u need to know basic physic, how different mass move, and its force. and also anatomy and acting. and lifeforms behavior. then u can convince people this is sea, that is cat and those are trees. to successly called animator, aside study text and pictures, look around you. real things are better than in your screen. draw sea and sky with darken and grey gradiently to make depth.u can make some effect like glow, blur, tint, opacity with flash. edit effects in after effect to get blur out of focus to make depth, flare, mist and so on. and the point is to bring out your point. the cat struggle, emosion, and focus of your eye. lessen the other movement so we wont distracted and keep focusing on cat acting. that is the most important thing in visual media. the main character acting. you can tweak and move however the background movement even out of the logics, but as long your center of the focus scene by scene express what you want and convince your mom the cat is swimming, you produce a animated video. and by no means, that reference cat video to be called simple animation, if you not alien from other planet.

If I create an object with special lighting effects and animations in blender, how do I import all that into Unity?

Well, animations can be exported into unity as a part of fbx, as long as they’re normal positional/rotational animations.Lighting effects and lighting animations will have to be re-created in unity by hand and will not transfer via fbx file.If you animated lighting parameters, then, to have easier time re-creating the effect in unity, I’d recommend to set up animated control objects and use their position/rotation/scale to control lights, then write a script in unity that does the same.In blender this functionality is called “drivers”, and similar features should be present at least in maya.Drivers - Blender Manual

How are special effects drawn? Are they drawn like a simple animations?

Most of the time they are done with different features in animation programs. Depending on the program they are done in a lot of very different ways. There are particle effects which can be very simple to do in some programs, and pretty complex in others. There are just too many different types of effects and ways to do them to give a very good answer.I would say look up some tutorials on effects in 3d animation software to get a better idea of how it works. Substance painter is a good program to help give you a feel for how some effects work. It is not an animation program however, but that is why it's simpler.If you're wanting to actually draw effects by hand, that just requires a lot of knowledge and skill with drawing. The main things to understand are lighting and shadows. It can be pretty tricky to get down.

What are the different types of animation effects in social media?

I guess I misunderstood your question and gave you a list of ill effects instead of animation effects :D____________________I can tell you the worst fewFamily loses out on your time.Loneliness in real lifeNo time for real interests and growth optionsCan't build up new skills or artsGet impacted by lots of negativity and lies onlineLose sight of the real and high priority things in your life while engaged in useless stuff

Is there relatively simple software to create animations for videos similar to this?

This is After Effects.  It's not simple, but it is powerful and if you're familiar with the conventions of PhotoShop and Illustrator then you should pick up AE rather quickly.  There are tons of tutorials from Adobe and others, thousands of them on YouTube for free.