Hi vienastoks and welcome!
This is the first time i hear about Eschalon. Hope i can still be of some help:
In general, Rio (demos/rio_de_hola) showcases much of what FIFE provides, so hacking around its code can be a good warm-up procedure.
Animation overlays are possible with recent FIFE git (newer than 0.3.5 release). Setting up that development version is less of a pain than it sounds (even on Windows) however ;-)
And finally, there's the
fife-rpg framework developed by Beliar. It provides more features specialized towards RPG developed with FIFE, including a tutorial with much the same purpose as Rio has for FIFE, so that's another possibility to start getting accustomed.