Seeking advice on rotating object

rotation-test-1

I’m new to animating, I understand frames and keyframes, I understand a little bit about deforming as it relates to animating, but I’m unsure of the best approach to animate this style of graphic.

As you can see this is 3 FPS and literally only 3 frames so far. I’m trying to animate the process of flipping a pig on its back (weird I know) for a client.

I anticipated that I could achieve this with some sort of deforming, but it seems I may have overestimated deforming’s ability when it comes to rotations. Because what I’m finding is that all the tutorials for rotating are basically frame-by-frame.

Is there a smarter way to do this than drawing nearly every frame?