Skirt movement

So instead of making an animation for every possible direction the hero's skirt could move, I was wondering if there was a way I could set the image of the skirt below the image of her and have it lag slightly behind until it was X pixels away and then start moving at the same speed as the hero. I've been looking around and with my limited knowledge I can't figure out a way to do this, any ideas?

<img src="http://i42.tinypic.com/2dl6mtz.png">

Edit:

Well now, it appears this was for a top-down game so my example is useless. Folks, please be more specific with your questions

It's top down view... sorry

Animation. For one sprite you can have multiple different animations, each of which are played when certain conditions are met.

So, when your character is moving, you can animate the skirt's frills flapping in direction opposite to the movement. That is easy - just draw the frills on left side of the sprite.

If you have different animations for body etc., just split the sprite up into components - skirt, torso, hands, head etc. so you can control each sprite's animation without having to create dozens of complex animations for each situation.

Bonus points: when your character stops, animate the skirt suddenly moving to the front, then settling down.

You could maybe do something with the sine movement.

Like if the character is moving set sine to width, and it will alternate from circle to oval.

I fixed this in chat.

In Soviet Russia chat fixes you

I'm pretty sure that in Soviet Russia Yakov Smirnoff doesn't even tell those jokes any more.

offtopic:

in Soviet Russia jokes tell Yakov Smirnoff.