Character rotation - need tips

hi, tonight I’ve finally solved 1 big issue for my side scroll project, rotate the character with the y axis of right thumbstick

but now I’ve another problem when the character start to move for rotation don’t have an animation, and the character in that case have speed equal to 0 so any type of animation don’t work, at the moment a simple step animation is good but how I can play it with character in place and speed equal to zero?