Is there anyway to get a flash animation embedded into a java program as an object, so that I can show the object as an animation.
Sure. Java Browsers like Opera load the Flash plugin and so can you.
Any suggestions on how I can go about that or should I just Google it?
when researching video playback, I looked in this aswell
can’t speak for SWF files really, but flv and stuff… not that easy
What about VLCJ, JFFMPEG and Xuggler?
JFlashPlayer works only on Windows 
Flagstone Transform SWF and JSwiff seem good 
Apart from licensing, writing code that you can ship, that will simply play your high quality video files on all 3 platforms, is just extremely difficult
JavaFX has own WebView control, though not sure if the beta can handle Flash yet.
Please don’t do this, unless you absolutely have to.
I’ve tried this in 2007, we needed to preview advertisements (which are usually SWFs) inside a Swing application. There are basically two ways to do this. The first is to parse the SWF file, which is what the libraries proposed in this thread attempt to do. Unfortunately this is extremely difficult as the SWF file format is very complex and Adobe provides minimal information on it [1]. The libraries therefore only support a small subset of Flash’s features, and the chances of your animation working as it should are minimal.
The other way is to use Flash Player itself to render the SWF, and then displaying the result in a Swing component. This is the approach we used, but it requires a fair bit of platform-specific code, and only works if the user has Flash Player installed. I’m not even sure if it works on all platforms, we only supported Windows in the end. Depending on your needs it might also be too slow.
[1] this is also the reason why the alternatives for Flash Player on Linux are so poor. It’s nearly impossible to emulate Flash Player and especially ActionScript with the material Adobe has provided. Depending on
Or you embed webkit in 10 minutes, and serve flash through a webpage.
Or you can use Awesominium to render webkit to an OpenGL texture and server the Flash through a webpage. libgdx has a (recently deprecated) Awesominium JNI wrapper.