Choppy Rendering

My game requires short spurts where a dozen or so things are on screen and animate at once. The way it works is when the player consumes specific potions the environment goes through a short transformation. I'm trying to keep the animations short, they're each at around 5 frames right now. The problem actually isn't involving the actual animation process, that seems to go pretty smooth. My problem is arising when my camera shifts. This happens when the player reaches a trigger at the right-hand side of a scene and the camera shifts to the right to show the next scene. The game gets choppy when the camera shifts. With the animations happening once or twice per scene I've had to break up the environment into smaller sprites but they all average at around 130KB each. Are these too large? Are there methods of optimization I could use? I don't have access to the source code but I could upgrade my license if I have to change some low level stuff to get this to work.