Character Animator was provided as part of previous versions of Micro Focus COBOL development systems as the debugger for you to use during the various stages of the application development cycle.
Within Visual COBOL, we recommend using the debugging facilities in the Eclipse IDE wherever possible, as it provides an excellent environment in which to debug your applications. However, in certain circumstances, such as the debugging of native COBOL applications directly from a terminal window, you can still use the Character Animator debugger.