Animated 3d objects

[~Spaceaholic]

So I have been working with opengl for a bit now and I can now load in a large collection of objects and create some pretty cool scenes. but as always, it is not enough... the objects I currently load in have no moving parts, which makes them kind of boring... I would like to try and make something similiar to temple run, with a main character that runs... how would I go about doing this, animating a human model that is?
I suppose I could load every body part in as a different model and have predefined positions to place the parts... then I could rotate the parts and create a sort of animation, but looking at temple run, or any of its copycat remakes the models seem to have a very fluid movement, and it seems like there is probably an easier way...
Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance for any help/resources....

[~Spaceaholic]

its called Skeletal or Bone Animation
http://content.gpwiki.org/index.php/OpenGL:Tutorials:Basic_Bones_System
this is some good stuff