Character Animator was provided as part of previous versions of Micro Focus COBOL development systems as the debugger for you to to use during the various stages of the application development cycle.
We do not recommend the use of Animator in Visual COBOL because the Eclipse IDE provides an excellent environment in which to debug your applications. In certain circumstances, however, Animator can still provide useful functionality (such as the debugging of deployed applications), so if you are familiar with using Animator you might want to continue to use it in such circumstances.