Computer animation can be an extremely processor intensive task. As the quest for higher levels of behavioural realism from animated objects increases, so does the requirement for increasingly powerful hardware to provide the results at interactive rates. The exploitation of parallel processing techniques for animation is attractive since there are generally a large number of objects changing state concurrently, but because of the high level of interaction between objects, practical implementations are problematic. This paper presents a model of a frame-based animation process that allows identification of the parallel requirements. From this, a task-processor assignment method is devised to keep the inter-task communications to a minimum, and an object-oriented model and dedicated processing architecture are given to take full advantage of the method.