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];
}

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

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

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.