They made a wonderful job at gamehistory.org, based on an in-depth analysis of the sources of the Mega-Cool Spot. At the core of their work is a technique and a toolset to allow more flexibility in animating graphics on 16-bits system that had read/write video memory on-board (as opposed to NES with read-only video memory alone, on the cartridge) and fixed-size sprites (e.g. 16x16, 16x32, 32x32).
drive game "Aladdin". The game was made by David Perry's team who also brought us

Everything else will seem silly to you if you do not accept that, by then, getting more KB of memory for your game was very - very - hard. The size of your game was decided by non-technical people based on how much the console vendor would charge for a 2Mbit chip, when the game should came out and how much kids would be allowed to spend given which license you'd be using. So they have early planning deciding how much to dedicate to sprites, levels, code, maps, etc. Based on that, they'll decide how much levels there will be in the game, etc.
Of course, game characters animation all started by having characters whose size fit the hardware requirements (mario nicely stands within a 16x16 box and a 16x16 mushroom makes him 16x32), flipping from one sprite to another within an all-in-VRAM bank. Then some special characters (the hero) would get a special status and only get one or two VRAM slots dynamically updated. To crunch more animation frames, one could use run-length-encoding compression...