If the animation is not too long and the frame not too large, you can make a texture atlas and put all of the frames of the animations in one file, then move the uv on your quad. Some time ago I made a class that makes exactly that: Animated texture via atlas (fake particles)
You can also go a step further and do the scrolling in a shader, that should work even faster. You can also try to use an array texture I think they are available in 1.9.x (but I’m not 100% sure), if your animations are hundreds of frames long this might be the best option.
You can also make a 2d polygon mesh for animations and use plain old joints/bones just as it would be a 3d animated character, the concept is surprisingly simple and from what I can tell extremely popular on mobile platforms.
Something like this:
esotericsoftware.com/spine-in-depth