Techniques of cartoon animation, when applied to the interface, provide the user with greater visual cues, and convey a feeling of substance to the objects being manipulated. The paper describes the effects used to animate many of the interactions in a structured graphical editor. The editor is used as a tool in a visual parallel programming environment and provides a new large application to test the effectiveness of the concept of animated direct manipulation. Also described are the implementation issues in order to provide animated graphical feedback for direct manipulation.