A new approach for the animation of articulated figures is presented. The authors propose a system of articulated motion design which offers a full combination of both direct and inverse kinematic control of the joint parameters. Such an approach allows an animator to specify interactively goal-directed changes to existing sampled joint motions, resulting in a more general and expressive class of possible joint motions. The fundamental idea is to consider any desired-joint space motion as a reference model inserted into the secondary task of an inverse kinematic control scheme. The approach profits from the use of half-space Cartesian main tasks in conjunction with a parallel control of the articulated figure called the coach-trainee metaphor. In addition, a transition function is introduced so as to guarantee the continuity of the control. The resulting combined kinematic control scheme leads to a new methodology of joint-motion editing which is demonstrated through the improvement of a functional model of human walking