It's unlikely you will do much, if any animation work on a laptop. If for any reason, the software usually used is licensed to the university itself and to get it for yourself would cost an exceptional amount of money. Typically you will work on computer clusters at the uni to do the actual animation and modelling work, and then your personal computer would just be used to do research, write essays, look for inspiration etc.
Even beyond the licensing issues, you would need a comparatively high spec laptop to be able to do animation work (outside of some fairly simple flash type animation anyway - i.e. 3D animation proper) anyway, which also adds a significant cost.