In computer graphics, animated models are widely used to represent time-varying data. And the progressive representation of such models can accelerate the speed of processing, transmission and storage. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to generate progressive animation models. Our method uses an improved curvature sensitive quadric error metric (QEM) criterion as basic measurement, which can preserve more local features on the surface. We append a deformation weight to the aggregated edge contraction cost during the whole animation to preserve more motion features. At last, we introduce a mesh optimization method for the animation sequence, which can efficiently improve the temporal coherence and reduce visual artifacts between adjacent frames. The results show our approach is efficient, easy to implement, and good quality progressive animation models can be generated at any level of detail.