Just my two cents here....
When you say "animation" I envision a series of images of depicting a character walking, a horse galloping, a fire exploding, etc. For things like that then a true graphics solution (such as Informatix's LibGDX) is absolutely required -- trying to manually animate individual frames is not only cumbersome it takes a lot of processing overhead.
If your "animation" is just
one static image rotating on a fixed point, shrinking, growing or moving across the screen then utilizing Informatix's
AnimationPlus library (which I believe is an extension of
Earl's original) is much simpler and provides outstanding results.
For what it's worth...