I never done any animation but I know 2 people that know (their full time jon) and I can confirm that they are clueless about programming. They can pick up programming easily from what I seen but it appears to be 2 different worlds.
It be interesting to see if anyone here has done either.
People who do animation in blender for example, know all the in and outs of this software, after hours of drawing a hand, they try to move it by all kinds of configurations and tweaking, without touching the code editor, thy don't have to learn programming, although their job is as difficult as programmers.