Cocos2d: Preloading animation causes a crash

I am trying to preload an animation in the init method of my layer. I then call the animation if the screen is touched. The app crashes with no error message as soon as I touch the screen and seems it is to do with calling the preloaded animation. I would like to do it this way as it seems expensive to create the animation every time the screen is touched - which does seems to work though. Any tips greatly appreciated.

Sample Code:

In my header:

@interface Test : CCLayer {
   NSMutableArray *wake;
   CCSprite* ani;
   CCAnimate *animate;
}
@end

In my implementation:

    -(id) init {
        if( (self=[super init])) {      
    // enable touches
    self.isTouchEnabled = YES;

[[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] addSpriteFramesWithFile:@"ani.plist" texture:[[CCTexture2D alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"ani.png"]]];
            ani = [CCSprite  spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"ani1.png"]; //comes from .plist file
            ani.anchorPoint=ccp(0,0);
            ani.position = ccp(700,65); 
            [self addChild:ani z:30];

    wake = [NSMutableArray array];
            for(int i = 1; i <= 4; i++) {
                [wake addObject:[[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] spriteFrameByName:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"ani%d.png",i]]];
            }
            animate = [CCAnimate actionWithAnimation:[CCAnimation animationWithFrames:wake delay:1.0f] restoreOriginalFrame:FALSE];

        }
        return self;                                                   
    }

Handling the touch:

- (void)ccTouc开发者_运维问答hesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
// run the animation
   [ani runAction:animate];
}

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Animations in Cocos2d are not designed to be reused. You need to create a new one every time.

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Problem solved by creating properties for the array and animation on the class using nonatomic,retain.

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You only need to retain the animation but the array can be local.

self.myAnimation = [[CCAnimation animationWithFrames:myAniFramesArray delay:0.1f] retain];

Remember to make the property nonatomic, retain as stated by Chev and to release any objects you retain in the appropriate dealloc method.