@JonB Thanks for the suggestions. Created a GifSpriteNode class which could be used like SpriteNode. Added support for duration. Used BytesIO instead of files. Added preload option. Here is the git repository
https://github.com/balachandrana/animating_gif_in_pythonista_scene.git
It does not seem to work for all gifs. There is no straight-forward PIL API to take care of all situations. Tried some solutions suggested on stackoverflow and other web sites but still all gifs do not work. Anyway I will try to see what could be done.