Flash provides amazing GUI and lots of visual features for animations. It allows the user build everything inside a particular platform without a full integration into the browser wrapped inside the browser with the main scopes that are multimedia and other kinds of animation.
HTML5 element <canvas> gives you an easy and powerful way to draw graphics using JavaScript. It can be used to draw graphs, make photo compositions or do simple (and not so simple) animations.
Here is a simple <canvas> element which has only two specific attributes width and height plus all the core HTML5 attributes like id, name, and class etc.
<canvas id = "mycanvas" width = "100" height = "100"></canvas>
Canvas is mainly considered now and Flash is outdated. With Canvas, you can animate shapes, scale, transform, etc.