Thanks.
Yes, it's a .gif. I discovered that Animation Shop comes on the same CD as Paint Shop Pro, so I did some playing. It was actually fairly easy. I just made subtle changes to my original picture and did "Save As" 8 different .gif's that I just named 1.gif, 2.gif, etc. Then, I used the animation wizard in Animation Shop and... voila! I'm an instant cartoonist. I lost a LOT of resolution and detail shrinking the file size down small enough to reasonably post, but the full-size animation (about 1.1mb) was very cool! The fire almost looked real.