Anyone figure out how sub-animations work?

I've tried searching for this and the only things I can find are people asking how to use them.

The idea is perfect for what I want to do, but I have no idea how to get started with it. I've already got around forty animations for my main character and that number's only going up from here -- organizing this mess would be so much easier if Mario could have sub-animations for walking with every power-up instead of individual ones for each.

EDIT: I think I might've got it. Tell me if this sounds right: Mario's generic walking animation is called "Walking", and small Mario's is called "SmallWalk". If SmallWalk is a subanimation of Walking, then to trigger it I have to set the animation to Walking, and then check if he's small Mario, and if he is, THEN set it to SmallWalk. It seems to be working so far, but I don't want to go through all of it to find out I've got it all wrong.

Never bothered with sub-animations myself, but if they don't work out you can use animation angles instead. For example..

For Standing/Idle/whatever:

0 = Big mario facing right
180 = Big mario facing left

1 = Small mario facing right
181 = Small mario facing left

2= Luigi facing right, etc.

This will drastically cut down the amount of events for character/type animations. Works better in MMF because of the direction clock thing, but whatever