Some years ago, I came across M-x animate-birthday-present (and therefore animate-string and animate-sequence) while reading through the output of M-x apropos-command RET . RET, which lists all of the interactive commands. (Well worth exploring! The Emacs Manual also lists a few unusual things under “Amusements.”) It’s one of my favourite examples of odd things you can find in Emacs, like M-x doctor and M-x tetris. I use animate-string to create the title sequences of Emacs chats like this one with Bastien Guerry.
It turns out that lots of people use the Emacs text editor for animating things. Andrea Rossetti (from Trieste, Italy) e-mailed to share this little thing he put together to simulate typing in Emacs. And, boggle of boggles, someone even taught a course on Emacs Lisp Animations.
Next: Maybe someone can make an onion-skin animation mode to go on top of artist-mode so that we can make Emacs flipbooks? 
Read the original or check out the comments on: Animating things in Emacs (Sacha Chua's blog)