If you want to bypass Kitware's animtovtkhdf translation layer entirely, you can read OpenRadioss ANIM files directly into Python memory using Vortex-Radioss, an open-source Python library developed by the OpenRadioss community specifically for post-processing.
Vortex-Radioss unpacks the compressed binary/ASCII arrays inside A00x files into standard NumPy arrays. Once the data is in NumPy, it is straightforward to construct a native pyvista.UnstructuredGrid.
Vortex-Radioss relies on lasso-python for CAE array handling.
pip install lasso-python