quick n dirty screen grab at low res.
I never see this technique in anything else, and they should have done this for the new one, Myst 5 does it similar and it was going to be used for Uru.

At a glance it looks like an animated sprite but I don't think it is, the aliasing on the edges could be blended out, but it's animated and you can look around it, it has depth. The trick is that you can't look at it from behind, which you couldn't do anyways.