There's a thing going around tumblr.
https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/emofuri
Japanese software that does sort of a 2.5D thing, helping you construct a front-facing animated character portrait with the help of some templates and guides. Looks like you come out complete with blinking, head rotation (with parallaxing hair and head parts) and some canned expressions.
Seems like the kind of thing that Spine is ready to do for games.
If anything, it's educational in terms of how you'd construct such a skeleton+meshes+animations to achieve the effect it can achieve.