I used to think that Flash was horrible proprietary evil. That was until I found Ming, http://opaque.net/ming. Ming is an LGPL library for PHP that makes producing Flash4 movies feel kind of swell.

Here's a few wiggly animations that I made just to see how some of the stuff worked. ( You'll have to excuse the huge file size, I'm still learning the Ming ropes. I'm thinking that I shouldn't have made a Sprite instance for each frame. ;-))

I also didn't do anything to preload the animations, so they are likely to go a little choppy untill they get completely loaded (depending on your network connection or how much beer they drink, of course.)