Same animations with varying sprite color? (ex: Mega Man)

I've started to advance my moving box prototypes into actual sprites with animations. For the most part I understand everything, and the transition is going smooth. However:

I want to achieve something similar to Mega Man where when a certain ability or weapon is selected, it changes the color appearance of the sprite.

I have "Idle" animation, "Run_R", and "Run_L" animations. Would I just recolor everything and save it as a new animation set? Ex: "Red_Idle", "Idle", "Red_Run_L", "Run_L", etc. for all variations? I feel like that would rack up the animation count. I just thought that there was probably a more efficient way to do this that I'm not aware of.

You can adjust the hue of a sprite via webGL shaders

Is that the only solution though? I don't want to change the hue of the entire sprite, but rather a certain section of pixels on that sprite.

You would need unique animations to do this, but if you're using Spriter then character maps will do this.