This poster presents an efficient Animation Planning Mediator (APM) designed to animate virtual characters in real time for crowd simulation. The APM selects the most appropriate animation clip available for each character and modifies the skeletal configuration to satisfy constraints given by the virtual environment and crowd simulation (CS) module, such as eliminating foot-sliding. Using a reduced number of animation clips, we blend within and between animation clips to increase the number of possible locomotion types and to adjust the animations to the velocity of each agent as indicated by the CS module. A key advantage of our approach is that it can be easily integrated with any existing real-time crowd simulation module working in continuous space.