This paper presents a new approach for interactive editing of multiresolution meshes. Editing operations (e.g. scaling and rotation) are confined to mesh regions of interest, called sub-meshes. Also, intuitive deformation operations (e.g. tapering and twisting) as required for animation systems can be used as well, allowing the user to have control on the local deformations of mesh objects. For that, each sub-mesh is defined interactively by picking up the cells of its frontier. Alternatively, a sub-mesh can be delimited by the shortest path of edges that approximates the intersection between a mesh and a given cutting plane. In order to speed up editing operations, the mesh is first simplified, the target sub-mesh is edited, and finally the whole mesh is refined back to its original resolution. This is particularly important for large meshes.