I don't think this can be done using jquery's animate function because the background image does not have the necessary css properties to do such fading.
41+ Jquery Animate Background Image Left To Right
Background. It can be done by jquery and css. So if the background image was one big image (like a sprite) i could then animate the moving / repositioning of this sprite using anmiate?
How To Remove Css Top And Left Attribute With Jquery Geeksforgeeks from media.geeksforgeeks.org
Changing the position of the background image felt to be the best approach to creating the type of effect we're looking for (and i'm not the first to jquery is a great library for this type of task but out of the box, it can't animate background position properly because of the need to animate two values. If you want to have a continuous animation as hira pointed out, put the animation code in functions, make sure the left and right movement is the same, and use the oncomplete option of animate() to call the next animation For this issue, i suggest you create two div with same size.
I tried your code sample however the problem with it is that the image goes to right and then comes back in reverse to left and than again goes to right.
I would like to animate the image from left to right, till it reaches one end and then from right to left. I would like to animate the image from left to right, till it reaches one end and then from right to left. Including extra elements, helpers and components. Use this jquery function that moves it:
