Question: Character physics and linear velocity

Hey everyone, I have a feeling that this has been asked before, but is there any way to do linear velocity or force with character physics? The reason is I want to make a ‘dodge’ move where the player steps far away. I tried animating, but he snaps back to the origin due to LocRot (or just location but I used LocRot). I thought animations worked differently, so anyways I decided to just go with velocity which only worked when changing the box to dynamic. Any ideas?
Thanks