Latest in my long line of things to use instead of Flash, I present, Three Gears Animated with JQuery.
This is actually a flick book style animation with a single image, shown left, made up off six frames that I created in Flash. Each frame is pasted into place on the page in quick rotation. The result is a pretty reasonable animation. Does it work for you? It is still not as good as Flash. The file size is over four times the size of the Flash equivalent and whilst adding more frames to a flash animation has a negligible effect, adding frames to this type of animation quickly bloats the files.

Why do you hate Flash Steve? Why!