Painting GIF images/using JLabels for GIFs... Somehow, make it work!

Question

Ok, I am basically making an arena for a local multiplayer game for my friends, and across the top of the screen is a title ... lets call the title "Game Title". The entire game is contained in 1 JFrame, including the title, sidebars, and the actual "game" part in the middle. I paint all of the objects in the game by painting them in the JFrame's Graphics when the paint() method is called.
Basically, the window looks like this:
| /\./\./\./\./\....Game Title..../\./\./\./\./\ |
|...........______________..............|
|...........|.--.game area.--..|..............|
|...........|_____________|..............|
Where the /\./\./\'s are animated flames. I have tried to just make them as ImageIcons in JLabels, but no matter what I paint() after the labels are added, the window looks like this:
| /\./\./\./\./\ .......................... /\./\./\./\./\ |
|.........................................................|
|.........................................................|
|.........................................................|
Where the flames are animated, but the "background" is always gray. I then tried to paint them as Images (g.drawImage(new ImageIcon(url).getImage(),0,0,null), but that only leaves the first frame of the animated GIF (in other words, its not animated).
What do I do? I have been reading around the forums, but I cannot find a case where somebody needed the GIF inside a Component that they used for painting...
Thanks for any help that you give!

Answer 1

If you're going to paint use a graphic component to do your painting in and don't add any components to it. The 'paint' method in JFrame is called by swing to draw the JFrame and its components. Using it to do custom painting is tricky. You'll need to call 'super.paint' to allow the container to paint its children. See the method detail in the JFrame api (link is in the Container section of the api). Also check the 'paintComponent' and 'paint' methods in the JComponent api method details section.
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import java.io.IOException;
import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
import javax.swing.*;
public class Painting extends JPanel
    BufferedImage image;
    public Painting(BufferedImage image)
        this.image = image;
    protected void paintComponent(Graphics g)
        super.paintComponent(g);
        g.drawImage(image, 125, 175, this);
    private JPanel getTitlePanel()
        JLabel title = new JLabel("Game Title", JLabel.CENTER);
        JLabel flame1 = new JLabel("flames");
        JLabel flame2 = new JLabel("flames");
        JPanel panel = new JPanel(new GridBagLayout());
        GridBagConstraints gbc = new GridBagConstraints();
        gbc.weightx = 1.0;
        panel.add(flame1, gbc);
        panel.add(title, gbc);
        panel.add(flame2, gbc);
        return panel;
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException
        String path = "images/Bird.gif";
        BufferedImage bi = ImageIO.read(Painting.class.getResource(path));
        Painting painting = new Painting(bi);
        JFrame f = new JFrame();
        f.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        f.getContentPane().add(painting.getTitlePanel(), "North");
        f.getContentPane().add(painting);
        f.setSize(400,400);
        f.setLocation(200,200);
        f.setVisible(true);
}