With the animations setting enabled the game has a lot of stuttering.

The main fault might be the tails since they have a lot of animation frames, but it's not the case for the eyes. I'm suggesting a middle ground where the npcs aren't completely static

Yep, sounds like a good idea. For Update 22 we'll be implementing seperate toggles for eyes and tails ,to give you more ways to tailor things to what works best on any particular device.