You can mess around with the variety of 'casts' available to see which fits best for your character.
For example, you put a raycast on X and when it collides with an object tagged wall, you can rotate the character and begin moving in the direction.
The real way to do this is with navmesh, astars pathfinder, Rain, or any sort of pathfinding agent available. But the quick and dirty way is with those raycasts.
As for the left and right animations, I guess you are using mecanim? That would be more with unity than playmaker but there are actions here for it as well. If you haven't check out the tutorials on Mecanim I would see this.
It glosses over some important areas, unfortunately, but the essentials are there.