Based on the equivalence principles of physical properties, geometric properties and externally applied forces between a surface and the corresponding curves, we present a fast physics and example based skin deformation method for character animation in this paper. The main idea is to represent the skin surface and its deformations with a group of curves whose computation incurs much less computing overheads than the direct surface-based approach. The geometric and physical properties together with externally applied forces of the curves are determined from those of the surface defined by these curves according to the equivalence principles between the surface and the curves. This ensures the curve-based approach is equivalent to the original problem. A fourth order ordinary differential equation is introduced to describe the deformations of the curves between two example skin shapes which relates geometric and physical properties and externally applied forces to shape changes of the curves. The skin deformation is determined from these deformed curves. Several examples are given in this paper to demonstrate the application of the method.