Your main issue seems to be... patience. The time you took to make these animations, you could've taken to lay the basis for a dynamic animation. I'll show you a bit of how I work myself (can't claim to be a pro at animating though who knows it helps
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(Direct link)So let me explain this a bit:
-I first modified your sprite roughly, added a tad more anti alias, simple stuff like that. Then I took it's structure, as a simple figure. I took the figure apart, to continue with that.
-So with something as simple as this figure, we can draw completely different poses, here I did that over the original with some different colours at first. It is the basis of the three frames already.
-On the third row I finalized the figure. Note that dark means behind something. So after that I added the weapon, and some motion path for it's tip, which can be included in the animation in a smoother way.
-So in this last row we see something wrong, no? Exactly, and this is where patience begins. It takes alot of time to transform the outline back into it's figurine correctly, and may need loads of comments and multiple attempts to turn out perfect, or at least as correct as you can get with your current skill (improving some along the way of course). Then you can fill it up with your basic shades again, and start reusing stuff from the original. The head can be duplicated and placed in the animation, with only a slight rotation possibly if it fits in better. So really, the part of animating is studying form and movement (your own body is a very, very good tool in doing that), and taking the time and patience to represent that form correctly in basic shapes, and in the final outline.
