I had what I thought was a decent sequence of frames (6) and then I googled for some more examples of "stick man" animation and got an example with 10 frames. So I created 10 frames of a simple stick man and then went back to my original animation of a Mario Brothers character and added another frame and changed the color of one pant leg. The 10 frames, even though it is a simple stick character, looks miles ahead of my Mario character. Here is a short demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XngaTcd793U