Problem with carrying an object [SOLVED]

[SOLVED! New problem in the fourth post...]

[ALSO SOLVED! ]

Alrighty, here's the deal: in my Mario platformer, Mario can pick up and hold items like shells and springs. I've gotten just about every aspect of that working correctly, except for walking into walls -- as it stands, the item will go through the wall until Mario physically hits the wall.

My attempts to change this have proven unsuccessful; apparently, Mario counts as a wall for some reason, so trying to use the "Wall to right/left" conditions to make the spring stop moving won't work. It makes the spring stop moving as soon as you pick it up (no matter where it happens to be placed, so it seems the problem is Mario). I tried checking for the spring overlapping the solid attribute at an offset, but same problem, even though Mario doesn't have the solid attribute.

Sooo... what else could I try?

in all the mario games where you can carry items, you can push them into a wall as your describing.

the only way i really see of fixing this is changing the actual collision mask for Mario when an object is being carried

Oh, wow... I have to stop going off of memory. I could've SWORN the item would stop you.

Well, that pretty much solves it. I went back to check and the item pushes itself out of the wall, which shouldn't be too hard to replicate. Thanks for pointing out my stupidity!

Okay, new problem, this time with animation. There's a special turning animation when carrying something, which works perfectly on the ground. It's set up to play when your angle is 0 and you press left and vice versa -- however, when you turn mid-air, it plays the OPPOSITE angle's animation. Any idea what's causing that?

I'll post the cap if necessary, but it's getting a bit too complex for me to ask people to dive into it to try and solve a little problem.