Sprite Management In A Game I have ideas, want more

[beeseven 0]

I'm currently making a game in Pygame (http://forums.xisto.com/topic/38927-pygame/), which doesn't allow animated gifs, so I need ways to store sprites and animate them. Right now I just have a bunch of nested associative arrays that are like this:

type of attack (stab, swing, not attacking) -> walking, jumping, or standing -> facing left or right -> list of images

This is all I can come up with, has anybody had success with anything different?