Hi,
Edgar from Brashmonkey had a solution for the odd animation behaviour - originally the png's we're exported from photoshop with a plugin which keeps the positions of the png's.
But it might be that the plugin caused the problems with pivot poinst when imported to spriter. Animations played well with spriter but unity didn't understand them.
Here's the plugin I'm referring to: http://brashmonkey.com/forum/index.php?/topic/2768-photoshop-to-spriter-photoshop-plugin-attached/ https://github.com/flyover/psd2scml
Here's Edgar's help (he gave me permission to use it here):
"Also as far as the rotator line in Spriter, that's very odd, and I haven't seen that issue before. If you have any idea how it moved like that (it should default to the top left corner if you didn't move it yourself), please let me know.
It is possible that this extreme pivot point is what's causing the issue with your runtime if that's what you're using. Fortunately it's very simple to fix this at least.
In Spriter, select one of the parts. There should be two circles - One of them you click and drag to rotate, and the other one lets you click and drag to move the center of rotation. Simply grab that other one and drag it to a location that makes sense. If you press Control - D with the part still selected it will copy this pivot point to all frames. After you fix each part the first time, right click on that same circle and choose 'Overwrite default pivot point'. Now when you go to the next animation to fix the pivot point, you can just rightclick the circle and choose 'use default pivot point' to use that same location, and then control-d to copy to all frames.
A couple more things about default pivots - By setting the default pivot point, from now on when you drag that image from the file palette it will automatically use that to begin with. You can also set the default pivot point by double clicking the image in the file palette"
That solved the problem!