Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate (previously well known as Adobe Flash, which is also the name used elsewhere in this wiki as it happens to be a bit more unique) is an animation program originally developed by FutureWave Software (as an extension of their SmartSketch product—earlier versions of Flash include support for SmartSketch's file formats), later bought by Macromedia, which was then finally bought by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc. Adobe].

One of the most important characteristics of Flash is its runtime (exposed to users as Flash Player), which executes the main export format supported by the Flash editor (characterized by the  file extension). This format is much closer to an executable (or really, Java's file format) rather than a video (like ), which usually made for very small files, particularly nice to have at the time when Flash was popular. This aspect however also made decompilation viable, which has been the subject of controversy in the past.

Sprite animation support
Flash's movie clip/graphic symbol system happens to be well-suited for sprite animation, more or less perfectly encapsulating the concept of a sub-animation made up of arbitrarily complex images that can be instantiated multiple times as necessary throughout the duration of the animation. Then, if a change needs to be made to that sub-animation, the system will automatically propagate the changes to all instances, cutting down on a lot of manual labor.