This is a class I built in 2008 to animate any textfield, character by character. All you have to do is create a textfield, enter the text you wish to animate, then pass that into the class and it will make a nearly exact duplicate of the textfield, with each individual character in its own movieclip, then animate them in or out based on different parameters. It includes a dozen or so animation options. Go ahead and download the source and feel free to use this code wherever you like.
[swf src=”http://kalinflash.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/CharacterEffectTest.swf” width=”400″ height=”300″]