change animation or direction without influencing physics

Is there a way to change the animation or direction without influencing the physics behavior?

If I change the direction the object physics change direction. If I change the animation but not the direction, it glitches up and begins to move strangely.

Make the physics object invisible and put a sprite for showing on top.

That's actually what I ended up doing. I was just hoping for an alternative because I plan to have several animated physics objects. I didn't want to keep track of twice as many items. Thanks though!

Put both objects in a container and a lot of the pairing management is done for you.