Last year I had the chance to test out a program called Dragon Bones Pro. I wanted to animate the logo of a friend´s company, an owl, with some format that would be faithful to the original logo, while keeping a simple format they could use in their website.
You can download the program and use it completely FREE, so it was a great chance to test out this kind of software.
You can split easily any image into different parts within layers using Photoshop
Dragon Bones Pro will automatically separate the different layered parts ready to be rigged and animated.
Yes! you can use a basic rig to move/rotate and scale the different parts of the 2d image, so it works in a very similar way as any other 3d animation package, but constrained in 2d´s
Pretty cool, fun and easy, and you can export things ready to use in your Video games too!