I have tried to import my character with animation from maya into unity however some of the characters pieces goes massive. I'm not after anything big just make him fall over in a simple motion, which I thought maybe easy to do in unity but just dont know how
You can do it in Unity using the animation editor. Bring your character into Unity, and go to Window/Animation. Add curves at whatever points you need them and create your animation. It's that simple.
It sounds like your scale may be off in Maya if your characters grow massive though.