Falling Animation

So, I tried adding an animation to my character that plays whenever he falls from a certain height... The fall-detection works, but the animation always resets his transform to 0,0,0. I heard that in order to have an animation play locally to the current position of the gameObject, you need to attach it to an empty parent object of it. I tried that but it just. doesn't. work. It never plays.

private var fell : boolean = false;

 var target : GameObject;


 function OnCollisionEnter(collision : Collision) 
 {
     if (collision.relativeVelocity.magnitude > 8)
     {
         fell = true;
     }
 }

 function Start()
 {
    if(fell)
    {
         target = GameObject.Find("target");
         target.animation.Play("FallingAnimation");
     }
 }

The target is the parent object containing the animation. What am I doing wrong? Is this even possible? X(

(Sorry if my english is horrible, I'm 13 and english isn't my native language)