Ok, I'm trying to animate a wilting field of wheat for an animation short I'm doing as a school project. I made three little wheat animations and I was hoping to just use them a bunch of times to create the field. I made the three wheat animations into symbols and just started dragging them onto the screen. The problem is, by the time I got enough to look like a field, the animation started running quite slowly.

My animation is supposed to have a very hand-drawn look, so I just drew the wheat and used the "trace bitmap" command, so each wheat animation has a lot of lines. I figured this might be the problem, so I used the "Optimize..." command (and I also tried smoothing and straightening it). This did seem to help a little, but not nearly enough to make the scene run smoothly. I've also tried getting rid of the symbols and just making a single layer, but this doesn't help enough either (probably because it doesn't really reduce the number of lines all that much). Right now all I can get is a smooth running wheat "patch".

I'd really like to avoid just redoing my wheat in simpler lines, because then it won't match-up with the rest of my animation, but right now that's all I can think of. I'm just about out of ideas given my limited knowledge of Flash, so I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions?