http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSR_BzNudTc

I use Carrara daily at work doing basic TV animation packages -- opens, bumpers, illo graphics, etc -- and it works quite well.  As Mark mentioned above, it's missing some of the pro integration aspects of C4D (which I have at home and use, but not nearly so much as I use Carrara).

Outside the day job, I'm putting together a cartoon-style animation project -- the link above is to one of our teasers.  All of the modeling and rendering was done in Carrara, with characters from Poser (this was Carrara 5 which didn't support character animation as well as C6 does -- I'm currently doing most of my character animation inside C6P).  This clip shows off one of the wonderful and inexpensive plug-ins Mark mentioned -- toon!pro from digital carvers guild (www.digitalcarversguild.com) -- it was around 40 bucks for the plug-in, and a similar plug (sketch and toon) for Cinema 4D is $595.00 -- more than the cost of Carrara Pro entirely.

Carrara is a bit funky, but you can certainly get pro results from it.

 - Dex