I’ve been following a beginners tutorial on how to animate a simple character. I was able to set everything up and have it all complete, but when I try to render the animation it’s incredibly slow and laggy. I am completely new to animation so I don’t really understand rendering and playing it.
when you render an animation, it saves it as a file type you specify. what you’re probably referring to is the actual rendering - and yes it can be slow. once it’s done you have to find the video and then it should play fine.
hope this helps! 
Hmm, it just seems kinda odd. the fps in the render were pretty slow, about 2fps. My simple animation of 120 frames took about 3 mins. If you make longer and more complex animations wouldn’t it take forever to render them? (or is it supposed to take that long?)
animations are typically 24 or 25 fps - you’ll have to change that.
Blender uses up a lot of system resources when it is rendering. What processor you have on your computer will make the biggest difference. Also several rendering engines can be used as plug ins. That might make a difference. And blender has a slower rendering engine than most programs.
I assume you mean when you play back the video file, the motion is laggy (not that it’s slow to render out the file).
Is the end result / playback slower(different) than when you preview the animation in the 3d viewport (alt-a or timeline “VCR” buttons) ? If not, then it might just be that the animation itself was keyed “too slow”.
Otherwise what codec and screen res did you render out to? … If you rendered to something like 1024x768 or larger, and used “avi raw”, the file will be huge and your machine may not be fast enough to play back the video file. If you did render to avi-raw, try avi-jpg or Quicktime (Sorenson3 for the compresion type).
If none of those suggestions help, post the .blend file, and we can look at it. (You can’t attach .blend files, you’ll have to upload the .blend somewhere and post the link …4shared.com is a good free file host if you need one).
Mike
The problem is when I have the animation set up and I press and Animate button and try to render it, the render sequence is what takes so long. Once it’s rendered though I can play it back in QuickTime at normal speeds. Are there any settings that I have to have set up for a faster renfer? Remember I’m really new to all this so it’s more than possible I’ve skipped an important step or have a weird setting.
What you’re describing sounds like normal behavior. Blender has to individually render each frame of your animation before you can play it back at normal speeds. Individual frames can take from a few seconds for a very simple scene (like two objects and one light) to hours if you use raytracing, mirrors, complicated geometry and many lights.
Once rendered, though, you can either play the video through some video player (VLC will play almost anything, and Quicktime Player is popular on Macs) or you can use the Play button in the anim panel in Blender.
If someone recalls the page listing all the things you can do to speed up a render, a link would be appreciated.
Welcome to BlenderArtists 
This is normal and expected. When they make films like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Madagascar and the like they pack in so much detail and colour it can take the computers hours to render each frame. It’s when you play back at around 25 FPS afterwards that you don’t notice any speed difference. You could compare it to claymation… where you painstakingly move each character millimeters, taking years to make the movie, but then playing it all back as a “short feature”.
I think the recent Transformers movie took around 30 hours to render a single frame, and they were using state-of-the-art computers to make it.
…this is why many of us render on “renderfarms” which is like a whole lot of computers working together to share the load. Typical renderfarm may have a few hundred computers all working on the same film sequence. Fortunately, if you have a few “spare” computers there are programs out there which can make them cooperate as a RenderFarm for Blender. If you don’t have loads of computers of your own, you could also opt-in to become part of the volunteer internet based renderfarm at http://burp.boinc.dk
EDIT:
I forgot to mention that Orinoco showed me a cool way to “playblast” in blender, which is kind of like a quick-render to check out your timing before the slower render-for-real…