🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm writing a video game for the Amiga that has 6 small men (12 by 11 
pixels, 2 planes) running around on the screen. I currently have them 
defined as animation objects and I'm using the Animate function to 
move them. Even though I'm only using a 320X200 2plane screen, the
anim objects move very slowly.
 
So here's my question:
   Is it faster to use blitter directly and keep track of all positional
   information manually, or do I have to be an expert programmer to 
   get things moving faster than Animate?
   
I currently have the program coded using Lattice C. Any hints and tips
for speeding up animation would be greatly appreciated.