Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is a compositing program originally developed by Company of Science and Art, later bought by Aldus, finally being acquired by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc. Adobe]. Despite being designed for use in the post-processing stage for film or animation, it has been used for the creation of complete animations as well, thus in the context of sprite animation it may very well be considered an animation program in its own right.

Sprite animation support
After Effect's composition system is a bit reminiscent of Flash's movie clip/graphic symbol, making it a good candidate for automating the process of keeping track of different sprites and their animation sequences as an animation progresses.