Simulate fire (quick way) I'm doing an animation on a 2D plane.
I have some 3D objects on it. 
Now I would like to show some fire. I know I can follow some smoke and fire tutorials and add this. But rendering takes very long.

Is there a way I can add 'simulated' fire/flames that doesn't need to bake and render so much?
I was thinking of trying to search an animated gif of fire and try to render this (never done this) but I have no idea if this would be the way to go.

Any suggestions?
You may fake a fire effect using animated movie e.g. .avi or .mov (.gifs are not supported as @Mr Zak said) to project it (using image seqence texture node) on a plane with transparency.


Add a plane and unwrap it. Download a fire animation from web (in my case I downloaded an explosion .avi file from here: http://wrathgames.com/blog/2011/12/25/explosion-animation-1/). Go to material nodes editor and set up the nodes as pictured below:


Set up the Emission node's strenght as you like. You might also use a Light Path node to get rid of the shadow casting by a projected movie clip.

To make the plane always face the camera (for the fly through animations  e.g.) use this solution: How can I make a plane always look at camera?