animating_gif_in_pythonista_scene

# coding: utf-8
import scene
import ui
from PIL import Image as PILImage

class MyScene (scene.Scene):
    def setup(self):
        self.im = PILImage.open('tunnelswirl.gif')
        self.mypalette = self.im.getpalette()
        self.savefile = 'tmp.png'
        self.toggle_state = False
        self.sprite = scene.SpriteNode(scene.Texture(ui.Image.named('Snake')),
            position=self.size/2,
            parent=self)
                     
    def update(self):
        if self.toggle_state:
            try:
                self.im.putpalette(self.mypalette)
                new_im = PILImage.new("RGBA", self.im.size)
                new_im.paste(self.im)
                new_im.save(self.savefile)
                self.sprite.texture = scene.Texture(ui.Image.named(self.savefile))
                self.im.seek(self.im.tell()+1) 
            except EOFError:
                self.im.seek(0)
                #self.im.close()
                #self.im = PILImage.open('tunnelswirl.gif')
                #self.mypalette = self.im.getpalette()

    def touch_began(self, touch):
        self.toggle_state = not self.toggle_state
        if not self.toggle_state:
            self.sprite.texture = scene.Texture(ui.Image.named('Snake'))
            
scene.run(MyScene(), show_fps=True)

On EOFError couldn't you just self.im.seek(0) instead of closing, reopening the image and resetting the palette?

An even slicker way to go might be to try to leverage ImageSequence.

In any case reducing "disk" IO from the animation process should speed things up a bit. I would have submitted a pull request but this code is in a gist, not in a repo.

use seek(0) instead of opening and closing again as suggested by @ccc