A) Turn off IK for the figure, and B) Go to the animation palette, highlight the entire thing, and make it Linear, rather than spline-based. Splines tend to do strange things that throw animators into fits until they're used to them (like setting facial morphs all the way to 3.000 resulting in a hideous monstrosity, when you simply wanted to move from 0.5 to 0.75) Hope this helps- if you haven't been doing that, you'll certainly find animating easier once you do.