I've been banging my head against a wall trying to find a solution to this problem in VX Ace, although it seems almost insurmountable - how in the world can I animate busts speaking, while also not using facesets, but rather pictures? My dialogue system uses pictures heavily to animate things easily.
I've completely ruled out finding a solution using the event editor - no matter what I do, autorun or parallel process, any attempt will end up stopping after text is displayed. Even if I place it in a loop, it's non functional. Obviously, it destroys the illusion. Moreover, even if I were to figure out a way to do that, I would have to individually time every single line of dialogue in the game - absolutely horrendous. No one would want to do that.
I don't know how to do it...and it seems from my fervent google searches that if anyone else knows how, they're not sharing. All I want to do is display a small 2 frame picture loop over other pictures, and time it to the every other text character being drawn to create the illusion of talking, and when the text stops displaying, the animation stops.
I truly feel like I'm going insane attempting to find a solution, so I'm just admitting that I need help here!