Im having trouble with blockbench and creating animated textures and Im wondering if this is an alternative solution and how I could do this.

You can look at vanilla assets for how to do animated textures, it is very simple to do it manually like you would for a texture pack, with only one PNG and one simple JSON file. See e.g. prismarine for a block, or check out the vanilla wiki:

https://minecraft.wiki/w/Resource_pack#Animation

Basically, instead of having a 16x16 texture, you have a 16x(16 * number of frames) texture, and each 16x16 area is one animation frame, stacked vertically. I don't think you can do this with separate PNG files, but it should be easy enough to stack up your different textures into one PNG using any image editor.

Then you need a mcmeta file which describes what order the frames go in, and how long each frame is. If your texture is animated_texture.png, the meta file is animated_texture.png.mcmeta. See vanilla textures or the vanilla wiki for what that file looks like.