Hi Wedgie & Chestnut - I'm actually not familiar with animating in Modo myself, so that was more relayed information from what others have told me before, that if you're not in Item mode when doing transforms you can run into problems with the vertex normal map not getting transformed along with the object.

What version of Modo are you using, Wedgie?

Another thing you might try is converting your object to a Modo "static mesh" type object instead of a regular mesh. I think that will triangulate it and make it not editable in all the same ways as a regular mesh like point squishing, but that may transform the normals better.

- Michael