This is not advertised very much, but CircuitPython can now load GIF files using the Adafruit's Image Load library — I have added GIF support to it a while ago, based on the example code a wrote here: https://github.com/deshipu/circuitpython-gif

However, there is one small technicality: that library doesn't handle animated GIFs.

An animaterd GIF image actually contains multiple images inside, each representing one frame of the animation. They can contain the whole frame, or just the differences from the previous frame, with everything else transparent.

I will need to modify my code to make it read one frame at a time — the SAMD21 microcontroller I'm using probably doesn't have enough memory to read all the frames at once. Hopefully the code will be fast enough to animate the image reasonably well.

If that fails, I might need to include a library written in C to read and display the animations.