Losing control over child animations once gotoAndPlay is invoked on parent

1

Hi everyone, sorry to bother you again but I’m having a bit of trouble. Basically, I have a container movieclip on stage that controls a child movieclip’s motion guide. The child movieclip has its own animations that I’m controlling in actionscript through frame labels. There is a still frame, a walkcycle and a swing cycle (the mc is a lumberjack character who swings his axe to chop a tree) under the labels “stand”, “walk” and “swing”.

When the flash file starts the lumberjack starts moving along the motion guide with the walkcycle animations playing and looping. The motion guide goes from frame 1 to frame 300 and once he gets to 300 the container mc is stopped and the “swing” animation cycle is invoked. A counter starts to count 210 frames (5 cycles through the “swing” animations) and once it reaches 210 I call gotoAndPlay(302) on the container mc which motion tweens him back to his starting point. But thats when I lose control over the child mc’s animations as I change the animation state back to “walk” but the child mc just plays through all its frames including the still frame and swing cycle, over and over again. How do I regain control over it?


//gamesprite is the large mc containing all elements of my game
//ljbox is the container mc for the lumberjack and controls his motion tweens
//lj is my lumberjack mc that contains all the animation cycles
 
   if (gamesprite.ljbox.currentFrame == 300) {
    
    gamesprite.ljbox.stop();
    if (chopCounter < 210) {
     lj.animstate = "swing";
     chopCounter += 1;
    }
    else if (chopCounter >= 210) {
     gamesprite.ljbox.gotoAndPlay(302);
     lj.animstate = "walk";
     lj.mc.scaleX = -.18;
    }
   }