How to animate a 2D-side-walk-(run)-cycle with 1 image

Hello!

I want to animate an image to get a ‘2D-walk-cycle’ (see attachment, obviously ‘side-view’).

I tried to import the image as plane, add subdivisions, add armature and weight-paint the plane. But distorting the plane gives some undesirable results (see attachment). How can I avoid this? Gives dividing the image into single parts better results? Should I paint a mesh and add the image as texture?

Thank you for any help!

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