Also the time is extremely limited. I had this pixeled beforehand, but had to bust out the animation as well as the animation for 6 more items like this in a little over a day.

 Hmm. Works fine for me in Chrome, but let's just say there's a lot of limitations. My graphics must get approved by my higher up and every time I make the eyes move on an avatar there is a "problem" with it. She says it looks creepy, so that answers that question. Also we have THOUSANDS of items on our site and bigger files like that use transparency can really add up fast. Honestly I just listen to what the programmers here tell me and if it's too big, it's too big! 

 it's slow in chrome too.

Agreed with the other comments.

Why are you guys that desperate to keep file size down, are you working with some kind of file size restrictions, programming-wise?

Adding a few extra frames shouldn't be an issue, imo.

You could also speed up the animation, although that could just be Firefox making it slow for me.

 Good animation considering your limitations, though shouldn't he be looking where he's attacking?

 Yeah I can see that. At my job we're really limited for the amount of frames we can have to keep file size down, so all the animations are going to be kind of choppy, but thanks!

It's good, the animation could do with some intermediate frames however as it's a tad choppy