Is there a nav menu plugin for this?!

I’ve been hammering css today and not really come out with a suitable result.

I have a nav menu that I have replace the text links with images. Looks good, but I didn’t think the images were obvious enough for links, so I created a little animated gif in photoshop and added it with a hover effect.

So I set it all up, hover over the image, nice animation that shrunk the icon and faded text in from the bottom, great, except as it was a gif, it only played once and then you’d need to refresh the page! *FACEPALM*

SO! Is there a plugin that allows allows images in the header, that also has a fade to another image on hover?

Due to it being in the header nav, it made it very hard to code around it so I was using css, and I can’t fade background-image’s in css :/

Any ideas?