Animated character interactions help

Hi, I want my game character to engage in some animated interaction with objects on the scene like tackling a barrels or NPCs. Can you recommend me a tutorial or help on how to do the animation of it? I'm thinking about creating character interaction animation on objects and use blank sprite on a character himself, or there's another options?
Sorry, if this theme already was on the site, I'm a beginner and only doing a first steps.

I would do it this way:

Make the Useable item (the barrel) an object with an image, then make a condition out of it
So if you use it, the condition changes and the object will not be shown anymore, but at the same time your animations starts, so it looks like they would still be there.
When the animation is done, another object (tackled barrels for example) with another condition (when tackled) will show up, since the condition will be set right after the animation ends..sorry my english today isnt pretty good, i hope you understood what i meant