Is it possible to slow down sprite animation and the begining of a game? (Without using triggers)

Not without modding, and I'm fairly certain there's no way to even come close to it, other than changing your game speed at the beginning, which is, once again, modding.

Well. Say you wanted a wraith to attack a target. You could (theoretically) stack wraiths and order them to massively shoot it. If the rays line up, it would look like one really, really long shot.

Why with out triggers? and couldn't you just slow the game speed down with like, unit lag or something?

press - a bunch of times.

Because I'm trying to use it in a top vs bottom map as a little start up thing at the start of the game.

Explain more, but the answer is probably no.

You can neither delay nor slow down the sprite animations from their normal speed. Not even if you used triggers.

You'll have to live with the fact that 3 seconds after the game started all animations have played.
However there are certain sprites (like the nuke targetting dot or the beacon) that show indefinite animation.

You can order units to cast certain spells (or tricked into casting spells) via triggering.

The poster specified that he wants this to work in Top v Bottom, not UMS.

Do sprites show up in melee? If so, that's the closest that the poster will be to accomplishing his (questionably worthwhile) goal of making a cool animation to start off the map.

Yes, non-unit sprites do appear in Melee, including weapon and other such sprites, I think he wants to slow it down, since they fade away so quickly.