If it's only a few frames you might be able to arrange them vertically in a PNG and animate background-position to get the same effect for cheaper.
Correction: you want to use transform to force creation of a new rendering layer, then when adjusting the rendered position of the element using transform will not cause a repaint.
It appears that every GIF frame is a Chrome paint (which makes sense) but a way to make the GIF static or turn off the GIFs would reduce paints down to basically nothing.
Correction: you want to use transform to force creation of a new rendering layer, then when adjusting the rendered position of the element using transform will not cause a repaint.