Hi Andy

You can create your balloon image and position it on one side of the canvas, then copy the image and place it where you want the balloon to end up. Blend the two images, convert to editable shapes, edit each shape as necessary, then copy each shape to a frame in the Animation tool, keeping them in order.

However, animated gifs are big files. You're better off creating your images in Xara, then importing them into a flash authoring app to do the animation.

I mostly use SwishMax (www.swishzone.com). KoolMoves (www.koolmoves.com) is pretty good, too.