Not in Skritter but in YellowBridge. I could SWEAR I saw it finally work after many Java and Adobe Flash installs in my Ubuntu system. But suddenly it did not work. THEN I got the idea to CLOSE the I-Bus daemon which displays the little keyboard symbol and lets me switch input methods to pinyin. Sure enough when I told it to QUIT then, suddenly, the animations started working. Then I was puzzled as to the best way to turn it back on short of rebooting and I found this helpful explanation.

http://saji89.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/automatic-startup-of-ibus-daemon-on-ubuntu-startup/

Oddly, I can get animations to work in Firefox but not in Chrome, which is fine because at least they will work for me in on browser but of course I am curious what is lacking in Chrome. Some of the fixes I come across look too dangerous because one wrong move and this newbie could crash his system and lose 100 hours of work. But the following link showed me some new functionality and suggests possibilities. The worst thing about these changes is there is sometimes no way to uninstall and ones only option is to start over from scratch.

http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-enable-adobes-flash-player-in-google-chrome-ubuntu-9.04-p2